“You think because he doesn't love you that you are worthless. You think that because he doesn't want you anymore that he is right -- that his judgement and opinion of you are correct. If he throws ...”

“I want to feel what I feel. What's mine. Even if it's not happiness, whatever that means. Because you're all you've got.”

“The function of freedom is to free someone else.”

“No gasp at a miracle that is truly miraculous because the magic lies in the fact that you knew it was there for you all along.”

“There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal. I know the world is bruised and blee...”

“She is a friend of mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.”

“[W]hen it's slow, they send you home, and when it's busy, they expect you to stay late. They also expect you to be able to come in to cover someone's shift if a co-worker gets sick at the last minu...”

“Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to p...”

“A man may beg, but a woman has to sell.”

“Some negroes lie, some are immoral, some negro men are not be trusted around women - black and white. But this is a truth that applies to the human race and to no particular race of men.”

“The only honest way to approach the question of whiteness and blackness is to start by accepting that these are arbitrary categories that were invented in the 17th and 18th century in order to just...”

“I never asked Tolstoy to write for me, a little colored girl in Lorain, Ohio. I never asked [James] Joyce not to mention Catholicism or the world of Dublin. Never. And I don't know why I should be ...”

“Until the philosophy which hold one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned...Everything is war. Me say war.That until the're no longer 1st class and...”

“When youre sharing a foxhole with another man, you don't worry about what color he is, just whether or not he will protect your back”

“And Charles turned around and called back without thinking, 'You know, you're awfully lucky you boys are white.'He didn't know why he said it. It had broken out of him. He'd wanted to speak with lo...”