It's better to have your blackness taken away than to stand there and lie about who you actually are. That's the trap.

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.

It kills me sometimes, how people die.

when the uncertainty is known, certainty is guaranteed. Until we unravel the uncertainties of our lives, we shall always be uncertain with the life we live

My country ... gave me schooling independence of action and opportunity for service. ... I am indebted to my country beyond any human power to repay.

Writing is communication, and you don't know how you're doing until you put it in front of someone else's eyes. You also learn from critiquing other writers' work.

The first step in wisdom, as well as in morality, is to open the windows of the ego as wide as possible.

If I speak of Vienna it must be in the past tense, as a man speaks of a woman he has loved and who is dead.

Yea, though the breath of disappointment should chill the sanguine heart, Speedily gloweth it again, warmed by the live embers of hope.

All good government must begin at home.

Most men are afraid of a bad name, but few fear their consciences.

The light of truth burns without a flicker in the depths of a house that is shaken with storms of passion and fear.