Quotes about Identity

We are all more than our experiences And less than our dreams ~ from I Am Glass

The tragic loneliness black women consistently face as we stand before judgmental others—sometimes white, but sometimes black; sometimes male, but sometimes female—demands that we have some wisdom, experience, and some passion with which to combat this abuse.

We in the Black Arts movement, which wasn't really a movement but a group of people who had similar objectives...

People are making the most unbelievable statements about the other based on that kind of insistence that the person who disagrees with you fundamentally can't exist. These are political statements as well as biological and everything else.

I mean, that the New World black woman needs a little of the Old World black woman in her, and the other way around. I don't think that they are completely fulfilled without the other.

if the decisions you make about where you invest your blood, sweat, and tears are not consistent with the person you aspire to be, you'll never become that person.

A man's character became involved to the point that he was caught in a mental turmoil which threatened all the values he held and threw them into doubt.

I had intended to write this book anonymously, using my prison number only. But when the manuscript was completed, I saw that as an anonymous publication it would lose half its value

The more one forgets himself—by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love—the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself. What is called self-actualization is not an attainable aim at all, for the simple reason that the more one would strive for it, the more he would miss it. In other words, self-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence.

People have enough to live by but nothing to live for.

The majority of prisoners suffered from a kind of inferiority complex. We all had once been or had fancied ourselves to be 'somebody.' Now we were treated like complete nonentities (The consciousness of one's inner value is anchored in higher, more spiritual things, and cannot be shaken by camp life. But how many free men, let alone prisoners, possess it?)

who shall measure the heat and violence of a poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?