If you make a mistake, then you should own that mistake.

Because white men can’t police their imaginations, black men are dying.

I want to believe that in any relational moment a person understands that the other person in front of them is just another human being.

You can’t put the past behind you. It’s buried in you; it’s turned your flesh into its own cupboard. Not everything remembered is useful but it all comes from the world to be stored in you.

The past is a life sentence, a blunt instrument aimed at tomorrow.

Define loneliness? Yes. It's what we can't do for each other.

Poetry has no investment in anything besides openness. It's not arguing a point. It's creating an environment.

Sometimes the art pieces I gravitate toward speak to me in terms of narrative, at other times they speak to me in terms of mood.

The worst injury is feeling you don't belong so much / to you.

If you admit to being racist, it says you acknowledge that you are being driven by projections and stereotypes that were formed in the creation of our country. Racism is deeply rooted in America.

Where is the safest place when that place / must be someplace other than in the body?

Maybe you’re not so bad after all.’He leant across the seat, jabbing his finger in the air. ‘If you tell anyone, I’ll deny it. I have a reputation to uphold, you know.

I wrote my first story in second grade, and was trying novel-length by sixth.

Over the past four decades no reporter has critiqued the American South with such evocative sensitivity and bedrock honesty as Curtis Wilkie.

I think that we come to a greater understanding of the world we live in and ourselves through reading.

Do you know we are ruled by T.V.?

It is revolutionary for any trans person to choose to be seen and visible in a world that tells us we should not exist.

You seek for knowledge and wisdom as I once did; and I ardently hope that the gratification of your wishes may not be a serpent to sting you, as mine has been.

The evidence for man-made global warming is as final as the evidence of Auschwitz.

No other sporting event can compare with a good Series. The Super Bowl is a three-hour interruption in a week of drink and Rotarian parties.

We can find true refuge within our own hearts and minds-right here, right now, in the midst of our moment-to-momen t lives.