...sometimes a start is all we ever get.

Migration gives a blank cheque to put anything you don't feel like addressing in the memory hold. No neighbours can go against the monster narrative of your family.

I don't think you can be from the Caribbean and not know a certain amount about the apocalypse.

The whole culture is telling you to hurry, while the art tells you to take your time. Always listen to the art.

Sometimes you just have to try, even if you know it won’t work.

She's applying her lipstick; I've always believed that the universe invented the color red solely for Latinas.

If you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level any reflection of themselves

We get these lives for free. I didn't do anything to get this life, and no matter what the hardships are, it is free and, in a way, it's an extraordinary bargain.

Colleagues are a wonderful thing - but mentors, that's where the real work gets done.

I think the average guy thinks they're pro-woman, just because they think they're a nice guy and someone has told them that they're awesome. But the truth is far from it.

[Donald] Trump is taking America's dirty laundry to the center stage. Everything he does, the rest of the country already does really well: victimize immigrants, poor people, women.

You necessarily have to be lost, before you’re found.

Kennedy echoed Stanley Baldwin that a democracy is always two years behind a dictator.

To become completely healed is to become the healer - bringing the beauty and meaning you found into the world.

Humanistic ethics is based on the principle that only humans themselves can determine the criterion for virtue and not an authority transcending us.

The museums are here to teach the history of art and something more as well, for, if they stimulate in the weak a desire to imitate, they furnish the strong with the means of their emancipation.

Common sense suits itself to the ways of the world. Wisdom tries to confirm to the ways of heaven.

I think writing is a very political act. I think that any writer who says it's not, is simply a writer who is disavowing the political connotations of what they write.

Do you write novels?" I said. "Novels, Lord no," she said. "I can't even stay married.

After all, when a thought takes one's breath away, a lesson on grammar seems an impertinence.

It is sad to tell, but after having tried society, which had caused his misfortune, he tried Providence which created society, and condemned it also.