She hated being a nobody and like all children, adopted or not, I have had to live out some of her unlived life. We do that for our parents - we don't really have any choice.

Why is the measure of love loss?

Yes, the stories are dangerous, she was right. A book is a magic carpet that flies you off elsewhere. A book is a door. You open it. You step through. Do you come back?

...there are two kinds of writing: the one you write and the one that writes you.

Part fact part fiction is what life is. And it is always a cover story. I wrote my way out.

Six books… my mother didn’t want books falling into my hands. It never occurred to her that I fell into the books – that I put myself inside them for safe keeping.

Sometimes you have to live in precarious and temporary places. Unsuitable places. Wrong places. Sometimes the safe place won't help you.

Where you are born--what you are born into, the place, the history of the place, how that history mates with your own-- stamps who you are, whatever the pundits of globalisation have to say.

Memory loss is one way of coping with damage.

To tell someone not to be emotional is to tell them to be dead.

We bury things so deep we no longer remember there was anything to bury. Our bodies remember. Our neurotic states remember. But we don't.

When you hear love calling you, don’t pretend to be deaf.

An animal in pain is the saddest thing on Earth.

I always like to be in the presence of people who are good at and love their jobs, Irrespective of their jobs.

Spirtual does not mean divorced from the physical, earthly realm. The Earth is one of the most divine forms in all creation.

Just think of all the billions of coincidences that don't happen.

It is not merely enough to have the ability to be persistant, you must also have the ability to start over.

No sane black man really wants integration! No sane white man really wants integration!

I believe that quality level is determined primarily by the actual design of the product itself, not by quality control in the production process.

It really pains me greatly to hear from graduate students that graduate education is a lower priority here.

Alchemy is really the secret tradition of the redemption of spirit from matter.