Books are meat and medicine and flame and flight and flower steel, stitch, cloud and clout, and drumbeats on the air.

Do not desire to fit in. Desire to oblige yourselves to lead.

We don't ask a flower any special reason for its existence. We just look at it and are able to accept it as being something different from ourselves.

I believe we should all know each other, we human carriers of so many pleasurable differences. To not know is to doubt, to shrink from, sidestep or destroy.

Reading is important - read between the lines. Don't swallow everything.

We are each other's harvest; we are each other's business; we are each other's magnitude and bond.

Don't let anyone call you a minority if you're black or Hispanic or belong to some other ethnic group. You're not less than anybody else.

I think there are things for all of us to do as long as we're here and we're healthy.

Truth-tellers are not always palatable. There is a preference for candy bars.

Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies. And be it gash or gold it will not come again in this identical guise.

What I'm fighting for now in my work... for an expression relevant to all manner of blacks, poems I could take into a tavern, into the street, into the halls of a housing project.

The Tanakee are thought to possess strange, almost supernatural powers.Their eyes are described as large and hypnotic." From Tribe of the Teddy Bear

Think first. Think twice. Think again. Respect others. Respect yourself. Respect dreams.

I like my women to be feminine, not sliding into tackles and covered in mud.

The object of teaching a child is to enable the child to get along without the teacher. We need to educate our children for their future, not our past.

I've worked with Morris Animal Foundation for more than 40 years now, and I'm so proud of all they've done to advance veterinary medicine for animals worldwide.

I've seen wonderful stay-at-home moms and moms who could use a little improving.

I don't believe in luck. ... It's persistence, hard work, and not forgetting your dream.

People are wrong when they say that everything should be more diverse, even, say, rock bands. It's an error, an overgeneralization.

To conform is to lose your soul

I don't expect anybody to know who I am.