You become strong by doing the things you need to be strong for.
Nobody was dreaming about me. Nobody was even studying me except as something to wipe out.
And that visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength.
Oppressed peoples are always being asked to stretch a little more, to bridge the gap between blindness and humanity.
I write for those women who do not speak, who do not have a voice b/c they were so terrified, because we were taught to respect fear more than ourselves. We've been taught that silence would save us, but it won't.
There is a constant drain of energy which might be better used in redefining ourselves and devising realistic scenarios for altering the present and constructing the future.
As the light wanes I see what I thought I was anxious to surrender I am only willing to lend.
When times are hard, do something. If it works, do it some more. If it does not work, do something else. But keep going.
Part of the lesbian consciousness is an absolute recognition of the erotic within our lives and, taking that a step further, dealing with the erotic not only in sexual terms.
Oppression is as American as apple pie...
Black women are programmed to define ourselves within this male attention and to compete with each other for it rather than to recognize and move upon our common interests.
Life is very short and what we have to do must be done in the now.
My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences.
I find the erotic such a kernel within myself. When released from its intense and constrained pellet, it flows through and colors my life with a kind of energy that heightens and sensitizes and strengthens all my experience.
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.
Hatred is the fury of those who do not share our goals, and its object is death and destruction. Anger is a grief of distortions between peers, and its object is change.
Only by learning to live in harmony with your contradictions can you keep it all afloat.
Each one of us had been starved for love for so long that we wanted to believe that love, once found, was all-powerful. We wanted to believe that it could give word to my inchoate pain and rages; that it could enable Muriel to face the world and get a job; that it could free our writings, cure racism, end homophobia and adolescent acne.
I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.
In our work and in our living, we must recognize that difference is a reason for celebration and growth, rather than a reason for destruction.
The fact that we are here and that I speak these words is an attempt to break that silence and bridge some of those differences between us, for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken.
If you conquer the bread problem, that gives you at least a chance to look around at the others.
We can sit in our corners mute forever while our sisters and our selves are distorted and destroyed, while our earth is poisoned; we can sit in our safe corners mute as bottles, and we will still be no less afraid.
There is an important difference between openness and naïveté. Not everyone has good intentions nor means me well. I remind myself I do not need to change these people, only recognize who they are.
It's a struggle but that's why we exist, so that another generation of Lesbians of color will not have to invent themselves, or their history, all over again.
Our visions begin with our desires.
Revolution is not a one-time event. It is becoming always vigilant for the smallest opportunity to make a genuine change in established, outgrown responses; for instance, it is learning to address each other's difference with respect.
Without community, there is no liberation...but community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.
Difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged.
The way you get people to testify against themselves is not to have police tactics and oppressive techniques. What you do is build it in so people learn to distrust everything in themselves that has not been sanctioned, to reject what is most creative in themselves to begin with, so you don't even need to stamp it out.
What gets me about the United States is that it pretends to be honest and therefore has so little room to move toward hope.
I am my best work - a series of road maps, reports, recipes, doodles, and prayers from the front lines.
I can't really define it in sexual terms alone although our sexuality is so energizing why not enjoy it too?
The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.
The sixties were characterized by a heady belief in instantaneous solutions.
Only within a patriarchal structure is maternity the only social power open to women.
If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.
As white women ignore their built-in privilege of whiteness and define woman in terms of their own experience alone, then women of Color become "other," the outsider whose experience and tradition is too "alien" to comprehend.
It is not the destiny of Black america to repeat white america's mistakes. But we will, if we mistake the trappings of success in a sick society for the signs of a meaningful life.
We are all more blind to what we have than to what we have not.
I learned that if I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.
Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.
I wasn't cute or passive enough to be "femme," and I wasn't mean or tough enough to be "butch." I was given a wide berth. Non-conventional people can be dangerous, even in the gay community.
I have a duty to speak the truth as I see it and share not just my triumphs, not just the things that felt good, but the pain, the intense, often unmitigated pain. It is important to share how I know survival is survival and not just a walk throught the rain.
The linkage of passion to dominance/subordination is the prototype of the heterosexual image of male-female relationships, one which justifies pornography. Women are supposed to love being brutalized. This is also the prototypical justification of all relationships of oppression—that the subordinate one who is different enjoys the inferior position.
Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people.
I have come to believe that caring for myself is not self-indulgent. Caring for myself is an act of survival.
What better way is there to police the streets of a minority community than to turn one generation against the other?
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.
