…kissing George was a little like rolling in caramel after spending years surviving off rice sticks.

I want to be violated by insight.

We're all getting too smart. Our brains are just getting bigger and bigger, and the world dries up and dies when there's too much thought and not enough heart.

It is so often surprising, who rescues you at your lowest moments.

Many kids, it seemed, would find out that their parents were flawed, messed-up people later in life, and I didn't appreciate getting to know it all so strong and early.

As a writer you ask yourself to dream while awake.

Light is good company, when alone; I took my comfort where I found it, and the warmest yellow bulb in the living-room lamp had become a kind of radiant babysitter all its own.

...a Dorito asks nothing of you, which is its great gift. It only asks that you are not there.

Mom flipped through the magazines like the pages needed to be slapped.

I admired that stride; it was like he folded space in two with it.

I like birthday cake. It's so symbolic. It's a tempting symbol to load with something more complicated than just 'Happy birthday!' because it's this emblem of childhood and a happy day.

I'll hear a song I love and suddenly I'm isolated from everything around me just for a nanosecond. That's a moment between a moment.

The Peninsula is what we have and there is no more where it came from.

Love is faith and one faith leads to another.

Ask yourself how many shots you would have saved if you always developed a strategy before you hit, always played within your capabilities, never lost you temper, and never got down on yourself.

This idea of compassion comes to us because we're made in the image of God, who is ultimately the compassionate one.

I haven't physically attacked anyone in a couple of years.

Dancers are a work of art - they are the canvas on which their work is painted.

I feel that my advances in the business world will shatter a lot of white myths about black athletes-and give some pride and hope to a lot of young blacks.

There is a pleasure that is born of pain.

Any one who chooses will set up for a literary critic, though he cannot tell us where he went to school, or how much time was spent in his education, and knows nothing about letters at all.