If you're going to hold someone down you're going to have to hold on by the other end of the chain. You are confined by your own repression.

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.

It's your words that gave me courage. It became my light that would guide me towards the right path again. -Jellal Fernandes

If you love yourself the most at your happiest moments, there is no reason not to be fond of who you are in the dark.

I jolt up, a scream lodged in my throat. Drops of sweat roll down my forehead and my throat hurts as if I've been screaming for a long time.

I have not taken my good looks seriously from the beginning. When I would be teased by my friends about my looks, I would just make a self-deprecating remark and let it pass.

Education should be the handmaid of citizenship.

The doors of churches, hotels, concert halls and reading rooms are alike closed against the Negro as a man, but every place is open to him as a servant.

My first show, in England, was called Soldier, Soldier.

The book trade is a spiritual barometer of a nations well-being.

Whilst I yet live, let me not live in vain.

Federal legislation is urgently needed to stop this insanity of wild animals in captivity.