"You have to believe in yourself, that you're gonna succeed."

“Truth is orphan without matter and matter is impotent without truth.”

“I've learnt to hide my tears on stage. They make people uncomfortable.”

“I still hear you humming, Mama. The colour of your song calls me home. The colour of your words saying, Let her be. She got a right to be different. She gonna stumble on herself one of these days. Just let the child be. And I be, Mama.”

Source : Sonia Sanchez (2012). “Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems”, p.58, Beacon Press

“Each period of a civilisation creates an art that is specific in it and which we will never see reborn. To try and revive the principles of art of past centuries can lead only to the production of stillborn works.”

“I love sailing and water sports; whether it's water skiing, body boarding or surfing or simply swimming in the ocean.”

“I was not a very good football player when I started out.”

“The young women, what can they not learn, what can they not achieve, with Columbia University annex thrown open to them? In this great outlook for women's broader intellectual development I see the great sunburst of the future.”

“No one wants for their child to become a refugee. It's an awful experience.”