Never be afraid to sit a while and think.
Seems like God don't see fit to give the black man nothing but dreams - but He did give us children to make them dreams seem worthwhile.
There is always something left to love. And if you ain't learned that, you ain't learned nothing.
I am a writer. I suppose I think that the highest gift that man has is art, and I am audacious enough to think of myself as an artist - that there is both joy and beauty and illumination and communion between people to be achieved through the dissection of personality.
The thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which must also make you lonely.
The problem in the world is the oppression of man by man; it this which threatens existence.
Take away the violence and who will hear the men of peace?
I think it is about time that equipped women began to take on some of the ethical questions which a male-dominated culture has produced and dissect and analyze them quite to pieces in a serious fashion. It is time that 'half the human race' had something to say about the nature of its existence.
I wish to live because life has within it that which is good, that which is beautiful, and that which is love. Therefore, since I have known all of these things, I have found them to be reason enough - and I wish to live. Moreover, because this is so, I wish others to live for generations and generations and generations and generations.
Children see things very well sometimes - and idealists even better.
I care. I care about it all. It takes too much energy not to care.
A woman who is willing to be herself and pursue her own potential runs not so much the risk of loneliness, as the challenge of exposure to more interesting men - and people in general.
The whole realm of morality and ethics is something that has escaped the attention of women, by and large. And it needs the attention of intellectual women most desperately.
You don't have to go to the kings and queens of the earth - I think the Greeks and Elizabethans did this because it was a logical concept - but every human being is in enormous conflict about something, even if it's how to get to work in the morning and all of that.
I have long since passed that period when I felt personal discomfort at the sight of an ill-dressed or illiterate Negro. Social awareness has taught me where to lay the blame.
If, by some miracle, women should not ever utter a single protest against their condition, there would still exist among men those who could not endure in peace until her liberation had been achieved.
I feel that women - without wishing to foster any strict separatist notions, homo or hetero - indeed have a need for their own publications and organizations. Our problems, our experiences as women are profoundly unique as compared to the other half of the human race.
As of today, if I am asked abroad if I am a free citizen of the United States of America, I must only say what is true: No.
I don't want to have anyone else to do my housework. I've always done it myself. I believe you should do it yourself. I feel very strongly about that.
Daddy felt that this country was hopeless in its treatment of Negroes. So he became a refugee from America. He bought a house in Polanco, a suburb of Mexico City, and we were planning to move there when he died. I was fourteen at the time.
