Quotes from Pearl Cleage

You can only get your heart broke so many times before you forget how to offer it up at all.

Because a lie can never make you stronger, no matter how many times you tell it.

We weren't looking for perfection. We were looking for the possibility of perfection, and that possibility is always most beautifully present in the faces of our children and then, if we are very lucky, in the faces of our grandchildren.

You know I love Brother Buddha, but until he reincarnates as a black man in America, I think we better go with what we know." Joyce

Grown people never ask you what they should do until they've already decided for themselves.

If you have to take a stand, home's the best place to do it," he said, and his voice was as soothing as the music.

Discomfort is always a necessary part of the process of enlightenment.

What she was saying reminded me of the scene in Gone With the Wind, where the town's most successful madam is trying to make a contribution to the war effort, and the proper slave-owning Confederate ladies refuse it on the grounds that her money is tainted. That always cracks me up. She earns her money with sex, and they earn their money breeding people, and her money's no good.

Because what looks like crazy on an ordinary day can look like love howling if you see it in the moonlight.

Because Library School will take up two whole years of my life, I have decided to keep a journal of events/feelings/reactions to it as long as I can stick it out. Judging from today, that might not be too long, but I will start with a reaction to yesterday so it will not be forgotten.

I felt like I almost understood. What was important and what was not. What was worth the time and effort and what was just a bunch of bullshit. And the more I looked at Eddie looking back at me, the more it was starting to make sense. Not all of it, but a little. Just a little, and at this point, that was all I needed.

What looks like crazy on an ordinary day looks a lot like love if you catch it in the moonlight.

How many terrible moments for women begin with the words "so I opened the door"?

em," she said softly. "That guy with the sexy voice told 'em to get ready

saw you, Sally Hemings is the name of it. It's in paperback for $3.25. She was Thomas Jefferson's slave and mistress for twenty-plus years. A really good book with real

Does peeing adversely affect makeup?

Because sometimes love just needs a witness... Somebody to testify. Sometimes love just needs somebody to step forward and say, Here I am, Spirit. Send me.

The problem I've had all my dating life is that the guys who drive me crazy sexually never seem to care much about being a part of the righteous forward motion of all peoples of the world toward peace and freedom. This is part of my parents' revolutionary curse. I have to consider politics even in the midst of passion.

She traveled a lot, got married a lot, divorced a lot, and always carried the scent of patchouli in the multiethnic clothing she invariably wore.

Well, I'm working on a project now with some women who are working as strippers." I liked the way she said that: "women who are working as strippers." Not "strippers." She made stripping what they did for a living, not who they were.

White folks don't have to do anything to you specifically. After they do it to a couple of other people that you know about, you are so incapacitated by fear that you ain't no use to the struggle anyhow.

Bad judgement and carelessness are not punishable by rape.

I need the words to find the music!

What good is trying to reform if you have to spend the rest of your life paying for the stupid things you did when you still got high and didn't give a damn?