Helped are those who forgive; their reward shall be forgetfulness of every evil done to them. It will be in their power, therefore, to envision the new Earth. -----“The Gospel According to Shug

I have fallen in love with the imagination. And if you fall in love with the imagination, you understand that it is a free spirit. It will go anywhere, and it can do anything.

Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender.

The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any.

No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.

Look closely at the present you are constructing: it should look like the future you are dreaming.

Whenever you are creating beauty around you, you are restoring your own soul.

I don’t need a certain number of friends, just a number of friends I can be certain of.

Every small positive change we make in ourselves repays us in confidence in the future.

In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they're still beautiful.

'Thank you' is the best prayer that anyone could say. I say that one a lot. Thank you expresses extreme gratitude, humility, understanding.

Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved to write a book.

She swallowed, her eyes dropping to his lips. And he knew she felt it too.

Hope is such an important component to moving forward and getting past the difficult times.

Thought is a process of exaggeration. The refusal to exaggerate is not infrequently an alibi for the disinclination to think or praise.

Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will.

There's always some amount of gradual, slow burning destruction over the course of partying.

We formed in 1993 to make it clear that we don't take our marching orders from anyone overseas, we have no connection to the Muslim Brotherhood.

I think it's good to look at how people lived before, and then take the best bits of that culture and try to mix it in with your own.

We must cut our coat according to our cloth, and adapt ourselves to changing circumstances.

I was doing about five movies a year for many years. I was just so tired. I walked around feeling like a Mack truck hit me.