There was a hint of spring in her sole green eyes, something summery in her complexion, and a rich autumn ripeness in her walk.

I have only to break into the tightness of a strawberry, and I see summer - its dust and lowering skies.

If you want to fly, you have to give up the things that weigh you down.

The function of freedom is to free someone else.

Don’t beg anybody for anything, especially love.

There is no such thing as race. None. There is just a human race - scientifically, anthropologically. Racism is a construct, a social construct... it has a social function, racism.

There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.

If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.

In times of dread, artists must never choose to remain silent.

All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.

Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.

Moral courage is higher and a rarer virtue than physical courage.

I'm a big State Fair person, and my main goal is to eat as much food as possible, but I tend not to do the foods on a stick. But I like Big Fat Bacon.

I do feel that if you can write one good sentence and then another good sentence and then another, you end up with a good story.

Forgetting the extermination is part of the extermination itself.

My family was always present when I needed them and sometimes felt even stronger emotions than me.

Ensuring a healthy future means investing in the generation who will carry that future.

Three days after my brother died, my father was in the hospital. He just did not want to live anymore. Before, he was fighting and loving life.

The boredom occasioned by too much restraint is always preferable to that produced by an uncontrolled enthusiasm for a pointless variety.

Faith is the act of seeing beyond the religion of possibility of the senses, the mind and the intelligence.

I was born in Columbia in 1954, the year the Supreme Court invalidated racial segregation in public schools. I visited frequently but did not live there.