The worst injury is feeling you don't belong so much / to you.

Because white men can’t police their imaginations, black men are dying.

I want to believe that in any relational moment a person understands that the other person in front of them is just another human being.

You can’t put the past behind you. It’s buried in you; it’s turned your flesh into its own cupboard. Not everything remembered is useful but it all comes from the world to be stored in you.

The past is a life sentence, a blunt instrument aimed at tomorrow.

Define loneliness? Yes. It's what we can't do for each other.

Poetry has no investment in anything besides openness. It's not arguing a point. It's creating an environment.

Sometimes the art pieces I gravitate toward speak to me in terms of narrative, at other times they speak to me in terms of mood.

If you admit to being racist, it says you acknowledge that you are being driven by projections and stereotypes that were formed in the creation of our country. Racism is deeply rooted in America.

Where is the safest place when that place / must be someplace other than in the body?

I am invested in keeping present the forgotten bodies.

The key to a wonderful life is to never stop wandering into wonder.

Self-respect leads to self-discipline and self-discipline paves a way for respect towards others.

It has been said that time heals all wounds. I don't agree. The wounds remain. Time - the mind, protecting its sanity - covers them with some scar tissue and the pain lessens, but it is never gone.

Poor Congo, barefoot bride of men who took her jewels and promised the Kingdom.

Being paid well for something you love to do - it's a grace.

People are islands,' she said. 'They don't really touch. However close they are, they're really quite separate. Even if they've been married for fifty years.

I don't think I'm that intellectual.

If we have data, let's look at data. If all we have are opinions, let's go with mine.

The Republicans' response to Obama confused a lot of people. I really think there's been a measure of clarity at the end, with Trump's election, that was not present during the Obama presidency.

From writing rapidly it does not result that one writes well, but from writing well it results that one writes rapidly.