If you're black in America, race is a factor in your life. Start with that assumption.

What drives people to public service is a sense of possibility. If you haven't sensed that possibility you don't get started in the same way, you don't feel you can have an impact.

We don't have a full black community in Boston. Our people are scattered. There's a middle class where I live in Highland Park but it's not like a piece of Washington or Chicago.

On the one hand, there is no reason that a black person needs to live a portion of his or her life being concerned about the people of color around him. On the other hand, if you don't you're crazy.

Everybody needs history but the people who need it most are poor folks - people without resources or options.

Food might be more immediately important than history but if you don't understand what's been done to you - by your own people and the so-called 'they' - you can never get around it.

It's very hard to write humor.

What if loving something means you should mostly feel frustrated and thwarted? And then a little ruined, too, by the pursuit? But you keep coming back for more?

Be dogmatically true, obstinately holy, immovably honest, desperately kind, fixedly upright.

We cannot really look at the movement of the Spirit, just because It is the Power by which we do the looking.

You're going to have Yahoo! and places that don't have rights being much more aggressive in how sports news is covered.

Part of the act of creating is in discovering your own kind. They are everywhere. But don't look for them in the wrong places.

I believe that religious education must be the sole concern of religious associations.

For me the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn't know I knew. I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew.

Have as much good nature as good sense since they generally are companions.

The tired parts of the mind can be rested and strengthened not merely by rest, but by using other parts.