What sets black people apart is not some deficit in personal responsibility. It's the weight on our shoulders. That is what's actually different. We have the weight and burden of history.

Racism is not merely a simplistic hatred. It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others.

An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future.

The best part of writing is not the communication of knowledge to other people, but the acquisition and synthesizing of knowledge for oneself.

I did not know then that this is what life is - just when you master the geometry of one world, it slips away, and suddenly again, you're swarmed by strange shapes and impossible angles.

When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse.

Racism is, among other things, the unearned skepticism of one group of humans joined to the unearned sympathy for another.

[E]mpathy - not squishy self-serving conflict avoidance - is the hand-maiden, not the enemy, of reason and intellectual inquiry.

You can live in the world of myth and be taken seriously.

If George Washington crossing the Delaware matters, so must his ruthless pursuit of the runagate Oney Judge.

The standard progressive approach of the moment is to mix color-conscious moral invective with color-blind public policy.

Joan Wernick said she took two lessons from the crash. “You’re going to die when you’re supposed to die.

A writer's mind can never be empty.

When I accept myself, I am freed from the burden of needing you to accept me.

I with borrow'd silver shine, What you see is none of mine. First I show you but a quarter, Like the bow that guards the Tartar: Then the half, and then the whole, Ever dancing round the pole.

With your own children, you love them immediately - and with grandchildren, it's exactly the same.

I do suspect that privacy was a passing fad.

Joy comes when we have the Spirit in our lives. When we have the Spirit, we rejoice in what the Savior has done for us.

Luck is indeed where preparation meets opportunity.

I have a theory... that someplace at the heart of most compelling stories is something that doesn't make sense.

A fisherman is always hopeful -- nearly always more hopeful than he has any right to be.