I came out of the Civil Rights Movement, and I had a different kind of focus than most people who have just the academic background as their primary training experience

Life's challenges are not supposed to paralyze you, they're supposed to help you discover who you are.

If you're in a coalition and you're comfortable, you know it's not a broad enough coalition.

I was at the Smithsonian for twenty years, and I'm still at the Smithsonian as a curator emeritus, and I still plan to figure out what that means for me at this point in my life

There is nowhere you can go and only be with people who are like you. Give it up.

If, in moving through your life, you find yourself lost, go back to the last place where you knew who you were, and what you were doing, and start from there.

If every moment is sacred and if you are amazed and in awe most of the time when you find yourself breathing and not crazy, then you are in a state of constant thankfulness, worship and humility.

If we dwell in a community that is comfortable, then it's probably not broad enough a coalition.

Mothering/nurturing is a vital force and process establishing relationships throughout the universe.

The voice I have now, I got the first time I sang in a movement meeting, after I got out of jail... and I'd never heard it before in my life.

When I started graduate school I was interested in the culture of the Civil Rights Movement.

Life consists of books.

... Once a penguin finds its perfect other penguin, they stay together pretty much forever.

The experiment of poetry, as far as I am concerned, happens when the poem carries you beyond where you could have reasonably expected to go.

Remember, once more how our world should be. And please, don't forget, please, please don't forget.

Avoid self-righteousness like the devil- nothing is so self-blinding.

We have grown so accustomed to the idea of divine love...that we no longer sense the awe that God's coming should awaken in us.

I respond to the sound of London being spoken - to the sound of London.

There's no deodorant for desperation.

His life was one long extravaganza, like living inside a Faberge egg.

It’s much easier not to know things sometimes. And to have french fries with your mom be enough.