“If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, there’s no progress. If you pull it all the way out, that’s not progress. The progress is healing the wound that the blow made. And they haven’t even begun to pull the knife out, much less heal the wound.”
Maya Angelou, in Black Women Writers at Work, (1983), Edited by Claudia Tate, Foreword by Tillie Olsen, Oldcastle Books, Harpenden, 1989, pp. 1-11 [Conversarions with: Maya Angelou, Toni Cade Bambara, Gwendolyn Brooks, Alexis Deveaux, Nikki Giovanni, Kristin Hunter, Gayl Jones, Gayl Jones, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Sonia Sanchez, Ntozake Shange, Alice Walker, Margaret Walker, and Sherley Anne Williams]