Being born a woman is an awful tragedy. Yes, my consuming desire to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, bar room regulars—to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording —all is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yet, God, I want to talk to everybody I can as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night.

Comfort can be a dangerous thing. You stick around home all the time where it’s safe and nothing ever changes, and before you know it, you get set in your ways and you quit learning, you quit changing, you don’t grow anymore.

There hasn’t been. Revolution is like a forest fire. It burns everything in its path. the people who are involved in a revolution don’t become a part of the system - they destroy the system, they change the system. The genuine word for a revolution is Unwaelzung which means a complete overturning and a complete change, and the Negro revolution is no revolution because it condemns the system and then asks the system that it condemns to accept them into their system. That’s not a revolution - a revolution changes the system, it destroys the system and replaces it with a better one. It’s like a forest fire, like I said - it burns everything in its path. and the only way to stop a forest fire from burning down your house is to ignite a fire that you control and use it against the fire that is burning out of control. What the white man in America has done, he realizes that there is a black revolution all over the world- a nonwhite revolution all over the world - and he sees it sweeping down upon America. And in order to hold it back he ignited an artificial fire which he has named the Negro revolt, and he is using the Negro revolt against the real black revolution that is going on all over this earth.