The happiest life is to be without thought

One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life: That word is love.

Rather fail with honor than succeed by fraud.

The dice of Zeus always fall luckily.

Always desire to learn something useful

Believe that a further shore is reachable from here.

All men make mistakes, but a good man yields when he knows his course is wrong, and repairs the evil. The only crime is pride.

Children are the anchors of a mother's life.

Heaven ne'er helps the men who will not act.

There is nothing more hateful than bad advice.

Go then if you must, but remember, no matter how foolish your deeds, those who love you will love you still.

There are people whose suffering makes them take their mind off other things in life

The single right decision to take is to forget the past so that it does not mislead you at a later stage

I lie to her. Because this world is not safe. The people who are supposed to protect us, the people we are supposed to trust -- I know that sometimes they are the ones who do the most harm.

Even on the most tiresome of days, I need to give my daughter and husband one hundred percent of my energy. They deserve that love, and in the end, it only fuels my energy.

Place is extremely important to my work because I am always pulling landscape imagery into my poems.

If you want to relate to a certain audience or generation, you have to speak their language. I truly believe that.

I don't think you can ever please all audiences.

I think everybody has a bisexual nature. That's my theory. I could be wrong.

There are enough negative images of Black women out there and I did not want to portray Dorothy Vaughn in any stereotype. I wanted to make sure that her integrity was preserved.

I was the youngest of seven kids and I would not have been able to go to college without an athletic scholarship.