"Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? 

It is beyond me." -Zora Neale Hurston

“Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive 

it is to be poor.” -James Baldwin

“I am a feminist, and what that means to me is much the same as the meaning of the fact that I am Black: it means that I must undertake to love myself and to respect myself as though my very life depends upon self-love and self-respect.” – June Jordan

“But surely to tell these tall tales and others like them would be to spread the myth, the wicked lie, that the past is always tense and the future, perfect.” -Zadie Smith

“When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.” – Audre Lorde

“Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is in an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob, and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.” -Frederick Douglass (Speech on the twenty-fourth anniversary of emancipation in Washington. D.C.)

“If there’s a book you really want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, 

then you must write it.” -Toni Morrison

“Healing begins where the wound was made.” -Alice Walker

“Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign. But stories can also be used to empower, and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people. But stories can also repair that broken dignity.” ― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“Shakespeare wrote about love. I write about love. Shakespeare wrote about gang warfare, family feuds and revenge. I write about all the same things.” -Sister Souljah

“Challenging power structures from the inside, working the cracks within the system, however, requires learning to speak multiple languages of power 

convincingly.” – Patricia Hill Collins

“If one is lucky, a solitary fantasy can totally transform one million realities.” -Maya Angelou

“I write for young girls of color, for girls who don’t even exist yet, so that there is something there for them when they arrive. I can only change how they live, 

not how they think.” -Ntozake Shange

“If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, 

change your attitude.” – Maya Angelou

“Nobody’s as powerful as we make them out to be.” -Alice Walker

“I always believed that if you set out to be successful, 

then you already were.” - Katherine Dunham

“There is always something left to love. And if you ain’t learned that, 

you ain’t learned nothing.” -Lorraine Hansberry

"Happiness comes from living as you need to, as you want to. As your inner voice tells you to. Happiness comes from being who you actually are instead of who you think you are supposed to be." -Shonda Rhimes

“No black woman writer in this culture can write “too much.” Indeed, no woman writer can write ‘too much’…No woman has ever written enough.” – Bell Hooks

Excellence is to do a common thing in an uncommon way. –Booker T. Washington 

You can’t make decisions based on fear and the possibility of what might happen. – Michelle Obama