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Death said: 'Where are you going?' They said: 'To where!' We walk along as if we are alike. As if there/here are the same. As if the road is the goal without end, but where are we going, and where are we from! We are the inhabitants of this long road to a goal that bears a single name: Where.

You give your joy to the blowing winds.

Reflected in the morning’s mirror, Your sudden smile made me glad.

Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.

everything dies for love of something better, a loose, or a lost ideal— precision of the letter.

I’m not asking you to come down here and clean out the muddy corners of my life. I’m asking you to be a forest where mud and leaves, shadows and light, growth and decay all have their unquestioned belonging. I’m asking you to be an ocean, where even great storms don’t trouble the depths and each tear is welcomed as a homecoming. I’m asking you to be as spacious as the vast darkness behind the sky, which will never be afraid of what I do or don’t choose. I’m not asking you to hold me together. I’m asking you to open so wide there’s room for all the ways I come apart.

Mortals remember, looking on the thing I am, that I, even I, was once a spring

Well, that explained a lot of things. That explained why jails and prisons all over the country are filled to the brim with Black and Third World people, why so many Black people can't find a job on the streets and are forced to survive the best way they know how. Once you're in prison, there are plenty of jobs, and, if you don't want to work, they beat you up and throw you in the hole. If every state had to pay workers to do the jobs prisoners are forced to do, the salaries would amount to billions. License plates alone would amount to millions. When Jimmy Carter was governor of Georgia, he brought a Black woman from prison to clean the state house and babysit for Amy. Prisons are a profitable business. They are a way of legally perpetuating slavery. In every state more and more prisons are being built and even more are on the drawing board. Who are they for? They certainly aren't planning to put white people in them. Prisons are part of this government's genocidal war against Black and Third World people.

Every revolution in history has been accomplished by actions, although words are necessary. We must create shields that protect us and spears that penetrate our enemies.

Black people should and, inevitably, must determine our destinies.

They call us thieves and bandits. They say we steal. But it was not we who stole millions of Black people from the continent of Africa. We were robbed of our language, of our Gods, of our culture, of our human dignity, of our labor, and of our lives.

Before I was in her class, I would never have imagined that history was connected to art, that philosophy was connected to science, and so on. The usual way that people are taught to think in amerika is that each subject is in a little compartment and has no relation to any other subject. For the most part, we receive fragments of unrelated knowledge, and our education follows no logical format or pattern. It is exactly this kind of education that produces people who don't have the ability to think for themselves and who are easily manipulated.

The birds have vanished down the sky. Now the last cloud drains away. We sit together, the mountain and me, until only the mountain remains.

I will exile myself further in my exile, I’ve promised myself. I will not write at all in Arabic till I have a body of work that I can claim as my own.

I tie my Hat—I crease my Shawl— Life's little duties do—precisely As the very least Were infinite—to me— —Emily Dickinson, #443 My mother’s mother, widowed very young of her first love, and of that love’s first fruit, moved through her father’s farm, her country tongue and country heart anaesthetized and mute with labor. So her kind was taught to do— “Find work,” she would reply to every grief— and her one dictum, whether false or true, tolled heavy with her passionate belief. Widowed again, with children, in her prime, she spoke so little it was hard to bear so much composure, such a truce with time spent in the lifelong practice of despair. But I recall her floors, scrubbed white as bone, her dishes, and how painfully they shone.

Sometimes in late summer I won’t touch anything, not the flowers, not the blackberries brimming in the thickets; I won’t drink from the pond; I won’t name the birds or the trees; I won’t whisper my own name. One morning the fox came down the hill, glittering and confident, and didn’t see me—and I thought: so this is the world. I’m not in it. It is beautiful.