The white people always want to fight someone and they always get the dark-skinned people to do the fighting.

It was so quiet, a reservation kind of quiet, where you can hear somebody drinking whiskey on the rocks three miles away.

The ordinary can be like medicine.

He looked into the crowd for approval, saw his mother and father. He waved and they waved back. Smiles and Indian teeth. They were both drunk. Everything familiar and welcome. Everything beautiful.

Summer coming like a car from down the highway.

Seems like the cold would never go away and winter would be like the bottom of my feet but then it is gone in one night and in its place comes the sun so large and laughable.

How much do we remember of what hurts us most? I've been thinking about pain, how each of us constructs our past to justify what we feel now. How each successive pain distorts the preceding.

More and more, he heard his spine playing stick games through his skin, singing old dusty words, the words of all his years.

It is unwise to feel too much if we think too little.

Don't do things to not die, do things to enjoy living. The by-product may be not dying.

A person who has not made peace with his losses is likely to accept gambles that would be unacceptable to him otherwise.

Get up there, where 'there' is . . . get up in front and . . . preach your guts out!

When God talks to humans he doesn't want humans to hear his voice.

There'd never been a clothing line made by a young woman like me: a multiethnic woman who has one foot in Gucci and one foot in the ghetto.

Little girls, like butterflies, need no excuse.

The only thing to do is to go one's own way, to try one's best, to make the thing live.

A constitutional statesman is in general a man of common opinions and uncommon abilities.

There never will exist anything permanently noble and excellent in the character which is a stranger to resolute self-denial.