Marigris’s Reviews > Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches > Status Update

"For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought."

"The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has a direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring through those lives."

"We are more blind to what we have than to what we have not."

"I came away with revolutionary women in my head. But I feel very much now that we, Black Americans, exist alone in the mouth of the dragon. As I've always suspected, outside of rhetoric and proclamations of solidarity, there is no help, except ourselves."

"I spoke in English and she spoke in Russian, but I felt very strongly that our hearts spoke the same tongue."