Status Updates From Sister Outsider : esseitä j...

"For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought."

"The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has a direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring through those lives."

"Everywhere you go, even among those miles of cotton being harvested in the Uzbekhi sun, people are reading, and no matter what you may say about censorship, they are still reading, and they're reading an awful lot."

"We are more blind to what we have than to what we have not."

"I came away with revolutionary women in my head. But I feel very much now that we, Black Americans, exist alone in the mouth of the dragon. As I've always suspected, outside of rhetoric and proclamations of solidarity, there is no help, except ourselves."

"I spoke in English and she spoke in Russian, but I felt very strongly that our hearts spoke the same tongue."

“It is the responsibility of the oppressed to teach the oppressors their mistakes … the oppressors maintain their position and evade responsibility for their own actions. There is a constant drain of energy which might be better used by redefining ourselves and devising realistic scenarios for altering the present and constructing the future.”