To this day writing is the most painful thing to do.

America is White and Black and Latino and Asian. America is mixed. America is immigrants.

Citizenship to me is more than a piece of paper. Citizenship is also about character. I am an American. We're just waiting for our country to recognize it.

For Filipino Americans, it's a battle for recognition, for identity in a culture where, for the mainstream, Asians tend to fade into a monochromatic racialized 'other.'

I am not the 'illegal' you think I am, and immigration is not what you think it is.

When people call me illegal, calling me illegal says more about you than it does about me.

To be in America illegally is actually a civil offense and not a criminal one.

You have to stand for something bigger than yourself.

I have no control over what people call me. The only thing I have control over is my work, and that's really all I can be judged on.

To me, it's just that social media is allowing people to be in charge of their own narratives.

I always felt like I had the word "illegal" tattooed on my forehead.

Never help a child with a task at which he feels he can succeed.

There is a need to find and sing our own song to stretch our limbs and shake them in a dance so wild that nothing can roost there that stirs the yearning for solitary voyage.

In my opinion the Open variation is absolutely correct - and more interesting than the Closed.

I bought into the myth that you are not complete without romantic love, without a mate. And it can really distract you from your goals. But sometimes you have to take a leap.

Whatever I think the song sounds like is what I'll name it. It's a feeling thing; it's not logical at all.

Within the silence, expansion, and sustained day by day concentration, I grow permeable.

Can't say no one makes money from Twitter now. The NBA does.

I always knew I had something special.

So-called 'undesirables' are not the problem. It is the measures taken to combat them that is the problem.

Read the Bible, read the Bible! Let no religious book take its place. Through all my perplexities and distresses, I seldom read any other book, and I as rarely felt the want of any other.