An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.

It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I’d been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here.

I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.

Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.

There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain.

The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.

It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even greater miracle of perception and charity not to teach your child to hate.

Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be

People can cry much easier than they can change.

Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.

Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go.

... And one day it dawned on me that I had spent entirely too much time waiting on you to grow a voice box.... and the balls to use it.

We might not be equal in what we know but we are surely equal, in what we do not know.

I have the heart of a man, not a woman, and I am not afraid of anything.

Each day is a little bit of history

Life is a continual process of arrival into who we are.

It's always great when a defense is able to create turnovers and score. That's something we missed last year. We'd get some turnovers, but we never scored points.

Maintaining concentration depends on what I call tunnel vision; nothing else in the world exists but the catcher's target, the hitter and my perfect delivery.

Is your perception of 'I Heard It Through the Grapevine' so shallow that it's violated by dancing raisins?

I do hope after my crossing that more people will follow suit.

You get all sorts of people in the library, and the librarian gets it all.