A 10-pound sack of potatoes lasts a long time.

People have the right to call themselves whatever they like. That doesn't bother me. It's other people doing the calling that bothers me.

I just knew there were stories I wanted to tell.

I was attracted to science fiction because it was so wide open. I was able to do anything and there were no walls to hem you in and there was no human condition that you were stopped from examining.

Tolerance, like any aspect of peace, is forever a work in progress, never completed, and, if we're as intelligent as we like to think we are, never abandoned.

I have a huge and savage conscience that won't let me get away with things.

Every story I create, creates me. I write to create myself.

I wasn't trying to work out my own ancestry. I was trying to get people to feel slavery. I was trying to get across the kind of emotional and psychological stones that slavery threw at people.

Listen, no part of me is more definitive of who I am than my brain.

All that you touchYou Change.All that you ChangeChanges you.The only lasting truthis Change.Godis Change.

God is Change.Earthseed: The Books of the LivingLauren Oya Olamina

Whatever will be, will be, if and only if you let it be.

The root of all fear is imagination.

Never exaggerate your faults your friends will attend to that.

Disease often tells its secrets in a casual parenthesis.

I'm the kind of person who can hear that stuff. If you sing along to the radio and you're not going to sing unison with the melody, but find the harmony, I find that pretty easy to do.

Yellow Face marks my summation of multiculturalism.

Gus knew. Gus knows. I will not tell you our love story, because—like all real love stories—it will die with us, as it should. I'd hoped that he'd be eulogizing me.

In America, they want you to accomplish these great feats, to pull off these David Copperfield-type stunts. You want me to be great, but you don't ever want me to say I'm great?

Life is meaningless; man's biggest challenge is to make it meaningful!

Life is like walking along a crowded street--there always seem to be fewer obstacles to getting along on the opposite pavement--and yet, if one crosses over, matters are rarely mended.