I think diseases have no eyes. They pick with a dizzy finger anyone, just anyone.

I've put up with too much, too long, and now I'm just too intelligent, too powerful, too beautiful, too sure of who I am finally to deserve anything less.

I am obsessed with becoming a woman comfortable in her skin.

My weapon has always been language, and I've always used it, but it has changed. Instead of shaping the words like knives now, I think they're flowers, or bridges.

You can't erase what you know. You can't forget who you are.

The beauty of literature is you allow readers to see things through other peoples eyes. All good books do this.

'Hispanic' is English for a person of Latino origin who wants to be accepted by the white status quo. 'Latino' is the word we have always used for ourselves.

If you know two cultures and two languages, that intermediate place, where the two don't perfectly meet, is really interesting.

People know when you're speaking from el corazón. You have that pain. Take that pain and do something with it. That's very powerful.

The world we live in is a house on fire and the people we love are burning.

You don't want somebody who doesn't know his own heart, do you? You'll find someone who's brave enough to love you. Someday. One day. Not today.

Everything was too sharp and clear, so that I could never tell where to start- the way a map that shows too much can sometimes be useless.

If we all do one random act of kindness daily, we just might set the world in the right direction.

Eventually there are going to be cities in space.

We were raised with that discussion about violence and non-violence, and we all pretty much came up on the side of non-violence. That became my foundation with politics and my livelihood.

More modern poetry is written than read.

... every little boy thinks he invented sin.

There are people creating Photoshopped pictures of me getting beat as if I were a slave back in the day.

In the 1920s you could buy stocks on margin. You could put 10 percent down and borrow the rest against your stocks.

The deepest mystery comes not when we don't know somebody well, but when we do.

O God, animate us to cheerfulness! May we have a joyful sense of our blessings, learn to look on the bright circumstances of our lot, and maintain a perpetual contentedness