Quotes from Pearl Cleage

tremendous profits

Music is music, but in a revolution, land and resources are supposed to change hands.

almost doesn't matter what black community you go in now, the problems are exactly the same. The kids are angry. The men are shell-shocked. The women are alone and the drugs are everywhere.

It's like the Léon Damas story about the black man on the bus who felt bad because the only other black man on the same bus was ugly and sweaty and dirty and ill-kempt. It is hard to express it. So sad.

Oppression is built on a series of assumptions, and if they begin to crumble, the system is in grave danger. The assumptions have got to be just as strong with the oppressed as with the oppression mongers. The oppressed must feel inferior and then he will act inferior.

My mother always said a steady diet of scary bad news was just a right-wing plot to make people afraid to trust one another, and I used to laugh, but I think maybe she was right.

When you're writing first person, all I can see and tell as the author is what that main character can see.

We danced too wild, and we sang too long, and we hugged too hard, and we kissed too sweet, and howled just as loud as we wanted to howl, because by now we were all old enough to know that what looks like crazy on an ordinary day looks a lot like love if you catch it in the moonlight.

no woman can love a weak man hard enough to make him strong.

Loneliness is black coffee and late-night television; solitude is herb tea and soft music. Solitude, quality solitude, is an assertion of self-worth, because only in the stillness can we hear the truth of our own unique voices.

If you don't annoy your big sister for no good reason from time to time, she thinks you don't love her anymore.

Any time your life is at stake and you can't find even one woman to come forward and say, 'This is a good man,' your problem isn't what kind of woman THEY are. Your problem is what kind of men YOU are.

Discomfort is always a necessary part of enlightenment.

Sometimes you meet yourself on the road before you have a chance to learn the appropriate greeting. Faced with your own possibilities, the hard part is knowing a speech is not required. All you have to say is yes.

the problem with knowing is that it takes away the possibility of pretending!

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

you can't know the meaning of the lesson until class is over!

You can't save a person who doesn't want to be saved. It was like Mr. Eddie always told the new gardeners: Everybody's got to kill their own snakes.

When you're young, there's a whole lot of stuff you say you'll never do. Once you get a little older, the list tends to get shorter.

old habits are hard to break, but not impossible!

Defiance means you got somebody with power over you.

Sometimes you have to show them what they want to see in order to get them to show you who they really are.

It is my belief that conscious African American students ought to be in a constant state of rage and in a constant search for ways to channel that rage into freedom struggle.

Buying flowers is not just a way to bring home beauty. It's an expression of confidence that better days are coming. It's a defiant finger in the face of those naysayers who would have you believe your fortunes will never improve.