Expect nothing. Live frugallyOn surprise.become a strangerTo need of pityOr, if compassion be freelyGiven outTake only enoughStop short of urge to pleadThen purge away the need.Wish for nothing larger...
In my work and in myself I reflect black people, women and men, as I reflect others. One day even the most self-protective ones will look into the mirror I provide and not be afraid.
That human compassion is equal to human cruelty and that it is up to each of us to tip the balance. I
You saying God vain? I ast. Naw, she say. Not vain, just wanting to share a good thing. I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it. What it do w...
You saying God vain? I ast.Naw, she say. Not vain, just wanting to share a good thing. I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it.
Without money of one’s own in a capitalist society, there is no such thing as independence.
Why can’t Tashi come to school? she asked me. When I told her the Olinka don’t believe in educating girls she said, quick as a flash, They’re like white people at home who don’t want colored people to...
Today Americans, who used to feel welcomed wherever we went, travel abroad with trepidation. We know we are not trusted or liked, that we are even hated, by millions of people around the globe. We mus...
They think, after the biggest of the white folks no longer on the earth, the only way to stop making somebody the serpent is for everybody to accept everybody else as a child of God, or one mother’s c...
Then she added thoughtfully, And that old woman that turned me off so short got down so bad in the end that she was walking on two sticks. And I knew she was thinking, though she never said it: Here I...
The heaving sickness past, her nausea gone, her bodily fluids replaced, she felt the lightness of being in the open space around her. Her walls the canyon's walls, she owned them not at all; her floor...
Some people don't understand that it is the nature of the eye to have seen forever, and the nature of the mind to recall anything that was ever known.
She thinks her sister has held life always in the palm of one hand, that no is a word the world never learned to say to her.
She got a right to look over the world in whatever company she choose. Just cause I love her don't take away none of her rights.
She can have them, Mama, she said, like somebody used to never winning anything, or having anything reserved for her.
Part of what existence means to me is knowing the difference between what I am now and what I was then. It is being capable of looking after myself intellectually as well as financially. It is being a...
My friend says to me:But what can we do? Already giving up.To be aware is already something,I say. Consciousness rarelyleaves us unmoved. Or unmoving.And so it is with this revelationof what has been...
My first step from the old white man was trees. Then air. Then birds. Then other people. But one day when I was sitting quiet and feeling like a motherless child, which I was, it come to me: that feel...
Life is very different when you have a good friend. I've seen people without special friends, close friends. Other men, especially. For some reason men don't often make and keep friends. This is a rea...
Let ’im hear me, I say. If he ever listened to poor colored women the world would be a different place, I can tell you.