The first job I had with the Smithsonian was as a field researcher among African American communities in Southwest Louisiana and Arkansas for the festival.

Life's challenges are not supposed to paralyze you, they're supposed to help you discover who you are.

If you're in a coalition and you're comfortable, you know it's not a broad enough coalition.

I was at the Smithsonian for twenty years, and I'm still at the Smithsonian as a curator emeritus, and I still plan to figure out what that means for me at this point in my life

There is nowhere you can go and only be with people who are like you. Give it up.

If, in moving through your life, you find yourself lost, go back to the last place where you knew who you were, and what you were doing, and start from there.

If every moment is sacred and if you are amazed and in awe most of the time when you find yourself breathing and not crazy, then you are in a state of constant thankfulness, worship and humility.

If we dwell in a community that is comfortable, then it's probably not broad enough a coalition.

Mothering/nurturing is a vital force and process establishing relationships throughout the universe.

The voice I have now, I got the first time I sang in a movement meeting, after I got out of jail... and I'd never heard it before in my life.

When I started graduate school I was interested in the culture of the Civil Rights Movement.

I am fighting to stay alive not because I fear death, but because I love life.

I thought of Shelley in the hospital, how she said sometimes sadness only looked like anger and judgment. Maybe fear did too.

Thank you for that, boy genius! Where did you graduate from? Hogwarts School for the Mentally Unbalanced?

The purpose of truly transcendent art is to express something you are not yet, but something that you can become.

An artist who has no faith is like a painter who was born blind.

It's good to ski for fun, but I still want to win races as often as possible.

I've never been a model, I was an actress for like a minute, but I've always been a writer. That's where I'm going to stay.

You just can't be scared to do things that you think are mistakes.

I rose by sheer military ability to the rank of corporal.

That, sir, which serves and seeks for gain, And follows but for form, Will pack, when it begins to rain, And leave thee in a storm.