If you have to get on your knees and bow when a white person goes past do it willingly.

When people saw what had happened to my son, men stood up who had never stood up before.

Have you ever sent a loved son on vacation, and had him returned to you in a pine box, so horribly battered and water-logged that someone needs to tell you this sickening sight is your son, lynched?

I think everybody needed to know what had happened to Emmett Till.

Writing is the only thing that when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.

Resist the short term temptation of procrastination

Fear is uncertainty.

The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears it is true.

Beauty is the gift of God

Prosperity is a great mercy, but adversity is a greater one, if it brings us to Christ.

I trained as a ballet dancer - well, I started when I was two and a half, and was serious about it from when I was eight until I was 18.

Pedantry is properly the over-rating of any kind of knowledge we pretend to.

Nothing stays the same, nothing remains static. Which way a thing changes depends on you.

You adapt yourself to the contents of the paintbox.