[The Great Migration] had such an effect on almost every aspect of our lives - from the music that we listen to to the politics of our country to the ways the cities even look and feel.

You must leave this world a better place than it would have been if you had not existed.

It occurred to me that no matter where I lived, geography could not save me.

People leave when life becomes untenable where they are.

America is made up of people who came from someplace else. Even the Native Americans came over the Bering strait... America is what it is because people came from someplace else.

It was illegal for black people and white people to play checkers together in Birmingham. And there were even black and white Bibles to swear to tell the truth on in many parts of the South.

My parents absolutely did not think of themselves as part of the Great Migration. They knew they were part of a great wave. No one really talked about it in those terms or gave it a name.

From Louisiana, he followed the hyphens in the road that blurred together toward a faraway place, bridging unrelated things as hyphens do.

I have gone to [this bookshop] for years, always finding the one book I wanted - and then three more I hadn’t known I wanted.

Happily Single is permission to CHOOSE your life rather than having it handed to you, and it’s living life on your own terms instead of those that are expected of you.

Your story may not have such a happy beginning but that does not make you who you are, it is the rest of it- who you choose to be

I spent my life learning to feel less. Every day I felt less. Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?

An education, other than purely professional or technical, can even seem to be an impediment.

I can't avoid writing. It's a sort of nervous tic I have developed since I gave up needlepoint.

There's something about having a great bottle of wine and a great cigar. Nothing compares to it.

Some of you with the way you running right now, the way you working, you will be extinct.

The best antidote to worry, I have always believed, is work and more work.

I felt like, in the recent past, people have been apologizing for Superman, a little bit, for his costume, for his origins, and for the way he fits into society.