Quotes about Empowerment

Say make me, remake me. You are free to do it and I am free to let you because look, look. Look where your hands are. Now.

Here I am not the one to throw out. No one steals my warmth and shoes because I am small. No one handles my backside. No one whinnies like sheep or goat because I drop in fear and weakness. No one screams at the sight of me. No one watches my body for how it is unseemly. With you my body is pleasure is safe is belonging. I can never not have you have me.

The narrower their lives, the wider their hips.

Can't nobody fly with all that shit. Wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.

Look to yourself. You free. Nothing and nobody is obliged to save you but you. Seek your own land. You young and a woman and there's serious limitation in both, but you are a person too. Don't let Lenore or some trifling boyfriend and certainly no devil doctor decide who you are. That's slavery. Somewhere inside you is that free person I'm talking about. Locate her and let her do some good in the world.

If you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else.

Don't let anybody, anybody convince you this is the way the world is and therefore must be. It must be the way it ought to be.

She needed what most colored girls needed: a chorus of mamas, grandmamas, aunts, cousins, sisters, neighbors, Sunday school teachers, best girl friends, and what all to give her the strength life demanded of her—and the humor with which to live it.

It was lovely. Not to be stared at, not seen, but being pulled into view by the interested, uncritical eyes of the other.

Mister was allowed to be and stay what he was. But I wasn't allowed to be and stay what I was [...] School teacher changed me. I was something else and that something else was less than a chicken sitting in the sun on a tub. (Paul D.)

Well, feel this, why don't you? Feel how it feels to have a bed to sleep in and somebody there not worrying you to death about what you got to do each day to deserve it. Feel how that feels. And if that don't get it, feel how it feels to be a colored woman roaming the roads with anything God made liable to jump on you. Feel that.

Beloved, you are my sister, you are my daughter, you are my face; you are me.