Quotes About Courage

We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired. For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.

One thing has always kept me going—and it's not really courage or bravery, unless that's what courage or bravery is made of—is that sense that there are so many ways in which I'm vulnerable and cannot help but be vulnerable, I'm not going to be more vulnerable by putting weapons of silence in my enemies' hands. Being an open lesbian in the Black community is not easy, although being closeted is even harder.

When we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard or welcomed. But when we are silent, we are still afraid. So it is better to speak.

We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired.

your smile has been to war

Maybe that is all any bravery is, a stronger fear of not being brave.

It was hard but very strengthening to remember that I could silent my whole life long and then be dead, flat out, and never have said or done what I wanted to do, what I needed to do, because of fear of pain, fear…If I waited to be right before I spoke, I would be sending little cryptic messages on the Ouija board, complaints from the other side.

We learn to work when we are tired, so we can learn to work when we are afraid.

Survival is the greatest gift of love

Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic. Only then does the necessity for interdependency become unthreatening. Only within that interdependency of different strengths, acknowledged and equal, can the power to seek new ways of being in the world generate, as well as the courage and sustenance to act where there are no charters.

I write for these women who do not speak, for those who do not have a voice because they were so terrified, because we are taught to respect fear more than ourselves. We've been taught that silence will save us, but it won't.

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.

What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? Perhaps for some of you here today, I am the face of one of your fears. Because I am woman, because I am Black, because I am lesbian, because I am myself — a Black woman warrior poet doing my work — come to ask you, are you doing yours?

For to survive in the mouth of this dragon we call america, we have had to learn this first and most vital lesson—that we were never meant to survive.

You become strong by doing the things you need to be strong for.

When we admit and deal with difference; when we deal with the deep bitterness; when we deal with the horror of even our different nightmares; when we turn them and look at them, it's like looking at death: hard but possible. If you look at it directly without embracing it, then there is much less that you can ever be made to fear.

Women are powerful and dangerous.

I realize that if wait until I am no longer afraid to act, write, speak, be, I'll be sending messages on a Ouija board, cryptic complaints from the other side.

I am myself, a black woman warrior poet doing my work, come to ask you, are you doing yours? And, of course I am afraid – you can hear it in my voice – because the transformation of silence into language and actions is an act of self-revelation and that always seems fraught with danger.

it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence.

I realize that if I wait until I am no longer afraid to act, write, speak, be, I'll be sending messages on a ouija board, cryptic comments from the other side. When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less important whether or not I am unafraid.

Your silence will not protect you

If I can look directly at my life and my death without flinching I know there is nothing they can ever do to me again.

Growing up Fat Black Female and almost blind in america requires so much surviving that you have to learn from it or die.