Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.
Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.
Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.
Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be
People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead.
Love takes off the masks we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up.
People can cry much easier than they can change.
I can't believe what you say, because I see what you do.
I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.
Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.
The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.
It is very nearly impossible to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.
Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go.
The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.
True rebels after all, are as rare as true lovers,and in both cases, to mistake a fever for passion can destroy one's life
To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.
Everybody's journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality.
You write in order to change the world ... if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it.
There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain.
People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.
The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he or she has become a threat.
You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.
People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state on innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.
Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity
Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.
Those who say it can't be done are usually interrupted by others doing it.
