...whom he had saved from a life of excessive freedom

What happens when you let an unsatisfactory present go on long enough? It becomes your entire history.

Things which do not grow and change are dead things.

When women age into their power, no wind can upset them, no hand turn aside their knowledge, no fact can deflect their point of view.

We do know that no one gets wise enough to really understand the heart of another, though it is the task of our life to try.

Our songs travel the earth. We sing to one another. Not a single note is ever lost and no song is original. They all come from the same place and go back to a time when only the stones howled.

You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart.

When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape.

some people meet the way the sky meets the earth, inevitably, and there is no stopping or holding back their love. It exists in a finished world, beyond the reach of common sense.

Of course, English is a very powerful language, a colonizer's language and a gift to a writer. English has destroyed and sucked up the languages of other cultures - its cruelty is its vitality.

Love won't be tampered with, love won't go away. Push it to one side and it creeps to the other.

The greatest purveyor of violence in the world : My own Government, I can not be Silent.

Mother is the center of the family

Mama says it’s just her nature. Some people are flowers, and some are thorns.

Death is our friend, precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love.

Why is it that we are constantly proving the world wrong but never proving ourselves right?

Women are like elephants. They are interesting to look at but I wouldn't like to own one.

Strictly speaking, the land does not exist; it is merely dehydrated sea.

Going back to Baltimore is awesome because all my friends still live there and there's never a dull moment when you're hanging out with your high-school friends.

Those that set God always before them and walk before him with all their hearts, shall find him as good as his word and better; he will both keep covenant with them and show mercy to them.

Be quick to make decisions, but slow to give up.