The most important question in the world is, 'Why is the child crying?'

I try to teach my heart not to want things it can't have.

The gift of loneliness is sometimes a radical vision of society or one's people that has not previously been taken into account.

Tea to the English is really a picnic indoors.

It is healthier, in any case, to write for the adults one's children will become than for the children one's "mature" critics often are.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

It's so clear that you have to cherish everyone. I think that's what I get from these older black women, that every soul is to be cherished, that every flower Is to bloom.

Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it.

Expect nothing. Live frugally on surprise.

All partisan movements add to the fullness of our understanding of society as a whole. They never detract; or, in any case, one must not allow them to do so. Experience adds to experience.

No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.

For in the end, freedom is a personal and lonely battle; and one faces down fears of today so that those of tomorrow might be engaged.

There are those who believe Black people possess the secret of joy and that it is this that will sustain them through any spiritual or moral or physical devastation.

People tend to think that life really does progress for everyone eventually, that people progress, but actually only some people progress. The rest of the people don't.

The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for white, or women created for men.

It no longer bothers me that I may be constantly searching for father figures; by this time, I have found several and dearly enjoyed knowing them all.

I think we have to own the fears that we have of each other, and then, in some practical way, some daily way, figure out how to see people differently than the way we were brought up to.

Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book, If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for.

And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see - or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read.

The trouble with our people is as soon as they got out of slavery they didn't want to give the white man nothing else. But the fact is, you got to give em something. Either your money, your land, your woman or your ass.

Us sing and dance, make faces and give flower bouquets, trying to be loved. You ever notice that trees do everything to git attention we do, except walk?

Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender.

People do not wish to appear foolish; to avoid the appearance of foolishness, they are willing to remain actually fools.

In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they're still beautiful.

The experience of God, or in any case the possibility of experiencing God, is innate.

To me, the black black woman is our essential mother, the blacker she is the more us she is and to see the hatred that is turned on her is enough to make me despair, almost entirely, of our future as a people.

Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me.

I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it.

The most important question in the world is, 'Why is the child crying?'

Anybody can observe the Sabbath, but making it holy surely takes the rest of the week.

The quietly pacifist peaceful always die to make room for men who shout.

In search of my mother's garden, I found my own.

The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any.

How simple a thing it seems to me that to know ourselves as we are, we must know our mothers names.

Nobody is as powerful as we make them out to be.

Horses make a landscape look beautiful.

Don't wait around for other people to be happy for you. Any happiness you get you've got to make yourself.

Helped are those who create anything at all, for they shall relive the thrill of their own conception and realize a partnership in the creation of the Universe that keeps them responsible and cheerful.

Yes, Mother. I can see you are flawed. You have not hidden it. That is your greatest gift to me.

What the mind doesn't understand, it worships or fears.

All History is current; all injustice continues on some level, somewhere in the world.

I have learned not to worry about love; but to honor its coming with all my heart.

Is solace anywhere more comforting than that in the arms of a sister.

Never be the only one, except, possibly, in your own home.

'Fame' exhausts me.

'Thank you' is the best prayer that anyone could say. I say that one a lot. Thank you expresses extreme gratitude, humility, understanding.

A good model of how to 'work with the enemy' internally is presented by the Dalai Lama, in his endless caretaking of his soul as he confronts the Chinese government that invaded Tibet.

A people do not throw their geniuses away. And if they are thrown away, it is our duty as artists and as witnesses for the future to collect them again for the sake of our children and, if necessary, bone by bone.

America is not nearly done. We're only in the beginning. Who knows who we will be? Who knows... what color we will be? It is all something that, maybe, our descendants - if they survive that long - will see.