We have to embrace the good over the bad. That has to be one's personal project.

I am this space my body believes in.

I knew life Began where I stood in the dark, Looking out into the light.

Poetry helps me understand who I am. It helps me understand the world around me. But above all, what poetry has taught me is the fact that I need to embrace mystery in order to be completely human.

Tonight I feel the stars are out to use me for target practice.

I excavate history. I look at lives buried under too much silence. Periods of time, like slavery, have to be revisited, reimagined, so we can move through them.

It wasn't a deliberate decision to become a poet. It was something I found myself doing - and loving. Language became an addiction.

I like connecting the abstract to the concrete. There's a tension in that. I believe the reader or listener should be able to enter the poem as a participant. So I try to get past resolving poems.

I think of language as our first music.

I said that love heals from inside.

I’ve been here before, dreaming myself backwards, among grappling hooks of light. True to the seasons, I’ve lived every word spoken. Did I walk into someone’s nightmare?

When you walk on the face of a world, then forgiveness comes.

And that's what makes you angry. What makes you hate. You don't want to believe that sometimes bad things happen just because they do.

Women can be incredible role models for their kids, neighbors and communities just by making good choices in terms of what they're eating and whether they're exercising.

Not only was I not born to be a slave; I was not born to hope to become the equal of the slave master.

Refuse to be cynical. Refuse to think that things can never change.

I think some industries are so far behind the rest of humanity, in the way they see characters and cast shows. Once those walls get broken down, it changes everything.

There are a lot of legislators who are afraid that kids will learn science and lose their faith.

It has been a mistake living my life in the past. One cannot ride a horse backwards and still hold its reins.

A Thaum is the basic unit of magical strength. It has been universally established as the amount of magic needed to create one small white pigeon or three normal-sized billiard balls.

persons, with big wigs many of them and austere aspect, whom I take to be Professors of the Dismal Science… Coining “Dismal Science” as a nickname for Political Economy