"How simple a thing it seems to me that to know ourselves as we are, we must know our mothers names."

"To me, the black black woman is our essential mother, the blacker she is the more us she is and to see the hatred that is turned on her is enough to make me despair, almost entirely, of our future as a people."

"We should learn to accept that change is truly the only thing that's going on always, and learn to ride with it and enjoy it."

"I'm not lesbian; I'm not bisexual; I'm not straight. I'm just curious."

"As a child, the family that I had and the love I had from my two parents allowed me to go ahead and be more aggressive, to search and to take risks knowing that, if I failed, I could always come home to a family of love and support."

"My family and I built my whole career from scratch."

"My mother said I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and more intelligent than college professors."

"My mother had to send me to the movies with my birth certificate, so that I wouldn't have to pay the extra fifty cents that the adults had to pay."