“How sick one gets of being 'good, ' how much I should respect myself if I could burst out and make everyone wretched for twenty-four hours embody selfishness.”
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One has a greater sense of degradation after an interview with a doctor than from any human experience.
The success or failure of a life, as far as posterity goes, seems to lie in the more or less luck of seizing the right moment of escape.
I got a lot of things that society had promised would make me whole and fulfilled - all the things that the culture tells you from preschool on will quiet the throbbing anxiety inside you - stature, the respect of colleagues, maybe even a kind of low-grade fame.
The fact that the adult American Negro female emerges a formidable character is often met with amazement, distaste and even belligerance. It is seldom accepted as an inevitable outcome of the struggle won by survivors, and deserves respect if not enthusiastic acceptance.