I quickly learned that motherhood was a high wire act sometimes performed without a net.

Surviving and believing in tomorrow is just a habit I can't break.

Racism is a virus. And since nobody's really looking too hard for a cure it reproduces itself over and over again.

To my father, who told me the stories that matter. To my mother, who taught me to remember them.

Novelists have to love humanity to write anything worthwhile. Poets have to love themselves.

I am a stranger to half measures.

It was important, I know, for my father as a product of his times not to be vulnerable, so he chose, and I can't say that I blame him, to live his life rather than create it.

Love is going to replace life and from then on it's all smooth sailing. Love will replace life.

Truth and falsehood pass through the same lips and leave no mark, the devil does not cease to be the devil just because he may have spoken the truth.

You may be cool under pressure and challenge, but can you be cool under success?

Typographical design should perform optically what the speaker creates through voice and gesture of his thoughts.

Smell and taste are in fact but a single composite sense, whose laboratory is the mouth and its chimney the nose.

Self-love, so sensitive in its own cause, has rarely any sympathy to spare for others.

Let's not pretend that all of a sudden, this is some new system.

You may envy every one, but no one envies you.

What I'm hoping to do though is to ground my extrapolations in specificity, and to make sure that the story I tell is deliberately and honestly told.

Children are the keys of Paradise. They alone are good and wise, because their thoughts, their very lives are prayer.

I think on death as the apparent end of the illusions that encompass us. They all have a sudden and unexpected end, that challenges any faith we have pinned to their worth.