Quote collection
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"I believed that there was a God because I was told it by my grandmother and later by other adults. But when I found that I knew not only that there was God but that I was a child of God, when I understood that, when I comprehended that, more than that, when I internalized that, ingested that, I became courageous."
"You can never go home again, but the truth is you can never leave home, so it's all right."
"When you do nothing you feel overwhelmed and powerless. But when you get involved you feel the sense of hope and accomplishment that comes from knowing you are working to make things better."
"I'm grateful to be an American. I am grateful that we can be angry at the terrorist assault and at the same time be intelligent enough not to hold a grudge against every Arab and every Muslim."
"To describe my mother would be to write about a hurricane in its perfect power. Or the climbing, falling colors of a rainbow."
"Elimination of illiteracy is as serious an issue to our history as the abolition of slavery."
"I wrote some of the worst poetry west from the Mississippi River, but I wrote. And I finally sometimes got it right."
"Love is like a virus. It can happen to anybody at any time."
"When you wish someone joy, you wish them peace, love, prosperity, happiness... all the good things."
"It is impossible to struggle for civil rights, equal rights for blacks, without including whites. Because equal rights, fair play, justice, are all like the air: we all have it, or none of us has it. That is the truth of it."
"I want to thank you, Lord, for life and all that's in it. Thank you for the day and for the hour, and the minute."
"If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat. It is an unnecessary insult."
"I love to see a young girl go out and grab the world by the lapels."
"Each of us needs to withdraw from the cares which will not withdraw from us. We need hours of aimless wandering or spates of time sitting on park benches, observing the mysterious world of ants and the canopy of treetops."
"Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future and renders the present inaccessible."
"Each person deserves a day away in which no problems are confronted, no solutions searched for."
"Fighting for one's freedom, struggling towards being free, is like struggling to be a poet or a good Christian or a good Jew or a good Muslim or good Zen Buddhist. You work all day long and achieve some kind of level of success by nightfall, go to sleep and wake up the next morning with the job still to be done. So you start all over again."
"Won't it be wonderful when black history and native American history and Jewish history and all of U.S. history is taught from one book. Just U.S. history."
"It's amazing. I can do anything. And do it well. Any good thing, I can do it. That's why I am who I am, yes, because God loves me and I'm amazed at it. I'm grateful for it."
"For Africa to me... is more than a glamorous fact. It is a historical truth. No man can know where he is going unless he knows exactly where he has been and exactly how he arrived at his present place."