As you know from school, it's when you have not prepared for the test that you have the fear of failing. And if you have prepared, even if you fail, you've done your best.

I have fallen in love with the imagination. And if you fall in love with the imagination, you understand that it is a free spirit. It will go anywhere, and it can do anything.

Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender.

The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any.

No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.

Look closely at the present you are constructing: it should look like the future you are dreaming.

Whenever you are creating beauty around you, you are restoring your own soul.

I don’t need a certain number of friends, just a number of friends I can be certain of.

Every small positive change we make in ourselves repays us in confidence in the future.

In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they're still beautiful.

'Thank you' is the best prayer that anyone could say. I say that one a lot. Thank you expresses extreme gratitude, humility, understanding.

When he admires the man he calls his father: a man slightly above the scum of the earth—what does that speak about he who admires him?

The eyes were certainly memorable and beautiful, moist calves' eyes heavily lashed and with the same look of troubled pain at the unpredictability of the world's terrors.

Not that complicated. I think I'm in love with you, Essie. But I also think you're not ready. I shouldn't have sprung it on you like that, so I decided to take it at your speed.

Excellence is the asymptotic state that never quite reaches perfection.

I felt like a number of things in me as a writer just clicked.

Let him avoid ,the acquisition of wealth and ,the gratification of his desires, if they are opposed to the sacred law, and even lawful acts which may cause pain in the future or are offensive to men.

If we see nature as pausing, immediately all mortifies and decays; but seen as progressing, she is beautiful.

A book is valuable not only for what it says but for what it makes you think, or causes you to remember. No matter what you wish to do or become there are books to teach you, help you, guide you.

When you're going through tough moments, you never know when you're going to have good moments.

The removal of Bill Cosby from his cultural pedestal seems pretty complete.