Black boys became criminalized. I was in constant dread for their lives, because they were targets everywhere. They still are.

I have only to break into the tightness of a strawberry, and I see summer - its dust and lowering skies.

If you want to fly, you have to give up the things that weigh you down.

The function of freedom is to free someone else.

Don’t beg anybody for anything, especially love.

There is no such thing as race. None. There is just a human race - scientifically, anthropologically. Racism is a construct, a social construct... it has a social function, racism.

There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.

If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.

In times of dread, artists must never choose to remain silent.

All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.

Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.

What you feed your mind, will lead your life.

Courage is like love, it must have hope for nourishment.

So much is lost, he said, in the shipwreck. What remains are fragments, and if you don't hold on to them the sea will take them too.

I do not believe in any religion, I will have nothing to do with immortality. We are miserable enough in this life without speculating upon another.

All of us are in desperate need of the restoration of our wholeness through union with our inmost self.

No animal admires another animal.

There is time for work. And time for love. That leaves no other time.

My idea of superwoman is someone who scrubs her own floors.

I don't like movies that are morally simple.

I sought trains; I found passengers.