“What a strange creature is a laughing fool,As if a man were created to no useBut only to show his teeth.”

“O that I were a man, or that I had powerTo execute my apprehended wishes!I would whip some with scorpions.”

“Princes give rewards with their own hands,But death or punishment by the hands of other.”

“Through darkness diamonds spread their richest light.”

“Oft gay and honoured robes those tortures try: We think caged birds sing, when indeed they cry.”

“Fortunes a right whore:If she give aught, she deals it in small parcels,That she may take away all at one swoop.”

“Have you ever dealt with people who have lost everything in just an hour? In the morning you leave the house where your wife, your children, your parents live. You return and you find a smoking pit...”

“Success is the best revenge.”

“Revenge sex is not something we seek, but once in your mouth it can be liberating if you just swallow.”

“No black woman writer in this culture can write "too much". Indeed, no woman writer can write "too much"...No woman has ever written enough.”

“When you reduce a woman to writing, she makes you think of a thousand other women”

“I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”

“All words are pegs to hang ideas on.”

“A word is not the same with one writer as it is with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.”

“No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake....”