107 quotes
It is not our differences which separate women, but our reluctance to recognize those differences and to deal effectively with the distortions which have resulted from the ignoring and misnaming of those differences.
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)
My anger has meant pain to me but it has also meant survival, and before I give it up I’m going to be sure that there is something at least as powerful to replace it on the road to clarity.
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)
When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.
The Cancer Journals (1980)
Guilt is only another form of objectification.
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)
I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood. That the speaking profits me, beyond any other effect.
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)
The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)
I am who I am, doing what I came to do, acting upon you like a drug or chisel to remind you of your me-ness as I discover you in myself.
Hatred is a deathwish for the hated, not a lifewish for anything else.
By ignoring the past, we are encouraged to repeat its mistakes.
The white fathers told us, I think therefore I am; and the black mothers in each of us-the poet-whispers in our dreams, I feel therefore I can be free. Poetry coins the language to express and charter this revolutionary awareness and demand, the implementation of that freedom.
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)
Survival is the greatest gift of love.
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)
We have to consciously study how to be tender with each other until it becomes a habit because what was native has been stolen from us, the love of Black women for each other.
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)
We can train ourselves to respect our feelings and to transpose them into a language so they can be shared. And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it.
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)
The grapes in Uzbekistan are incredible fruit. They seem to have a life of their own. They’re called “the bridesmaid’s little finger,” and that’s about the size of them. They’re very long, and green, and they’re absolutely the most delicious.
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)
In order to perpetuate itself, every oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change.
When I speak of knowledge, as you know, I am speaking of that dark and true depth which understanding serves, waits upon, and makes accessible through language to ourselves and others. It is this depth within each of us that nurtures vision.
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)
When I speak of the erotic, then I speak of it as an assertion of the life force of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.
Meditations for Women Who Do Too Much (1990)
Hatred — an emotional habit or attitude of mind in which aversion is coupled with ill will. Anger, used, does not destroy. Hatred does.
Living in to the fear of feeling and working to capacity is a luxury only the unintentional can afford, and the unintentional are those who do not wish to guide their own destinies.
Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest external horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)