When you are working on something, you have to believe that people will still be reading when you're done!

All anyone can hope for is just a tiny bit of love, like a drop in a cup if you can get it, or a waterfall, a flood, if you can get that too.

Love is like the rain. It comes in a drizzle sometimes. Then it starts pouring and if you're not careful it will drown you.

Create dangerously, for people who read dangerously. ... Writing, knowing in part that no matter how trivial your words may seem, someday, somewhere, someone may risk his or her life to read them.

There is a frustration too, that at moments when there's not a coup, when there are not people in the streets, that the country disappears from people's consciousness.

When you write ,it's like braiding your hair. Taking a handful of coarse unruly strands and attempting to bring then unity.

It's not easy to start over in a new place,' he said. 'Exile is not for everyone. Someone has to stay behind, to receive the letters and greet family members when they come back.

People are just too hopeful, and sometimes hope is the biggest weapon of all to use against us. People will believe anything.

I think Haiti is a place that suffers so much from neglect that people only want to hear about it when it’s at its extreme. And that’s what they end up knowing about it.

Toni Cade Bambara said: “Writing is the way I participate in the struggle.”

Misery won't touch you gentle. It always leaves its thumbprints on you; sometimes it leaves them for others to see, sometimes for nobody but you to know of.

Just us fancy wise-men trying to take on the world.

i don't think college is something you should tough out.

She was beginning to recognize it as the feeling of anger taken to such a level it was no longer possible to separate it from any other emotion or thought. In a way, it was a liberating sensation.

My poverty is not complete: it lacks me.

The future never comes. Life is always now.

It is in the field of prayer that life's critical battles are lost or won...In prayer we bring our spiritual enemies into the Presence of God and we fight them there.

Curve: The loveliest distance between two points.

Two may talk and one may hear, but three cannot take part in a conversation of the most sincere and searching sort.

You may glory in a team triumphant... But you fall in love with a team in defeat.

I hated school. After 15, you went off to college if you were good enough. It didn't appeal to me so I left school. I did what everybody did - get a job.