The power to define the other seals one's definition of oneself.

It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I’d been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here.

I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.

Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.

There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain.

The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.

It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even greater miracle of perception and charity not to teach your child to hate.

Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be

People can cry much easier than they can change.

Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.

Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go.

All right, " she said. "Give me the books that are kind to me, and to hell with the men who don't give a damn about me.

To die fulfilled is to have discovered self and purpose and to achieve all that comes in these two packages

I rarely ever put my head above the rampart and see where this big lumbering behemoth called 'global literature' is going.

Ah, God! what trances of torments does that man endure who is consumed with one unachieved revengeful desire. He sleeps with clenched hands; and wakes with his own bloody nails in his palms.

As institutional psychopaths, corporations are wont to remove obstacles that get into their way.

I never had a serious injury that kept me out of a big competition. Now everyone has injuries - to their feet or their knees or their backs.

Jesus must have been a psychopath

A line is a fuse that's lit. The line smolders, the rhyme explodes— and by a stanza a city is blown to bits.

I taught myself to name my name, To bark back, loosen love and crying; To ease my woman so she came, To ease an old man who was dying.

I'm doing this because I want to do it better.