In my work and in myself I reflect black people, women and men, as I reflect others. One day even the most self-protective ones will look into the mirror I provide and not be afraid.

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.

Learn to accept and bend like the willow. For if you resist, you will break like the oak.

She was every inch the skeletal goddess that had been promised by the bones of her feet.

If you want me, take me, " she dared him.

It is easy to talk on religion, but difficult to practice it.

The period without the diary remains an ordeal. Every evening I want my diary as one wants opium.

The spiritual life is a reaching out to our innermost self, to our fellow human and to our God.

Look, up in the sky! It's the sky!

Saying what you believe others want to hear is, of course, a form of lying.

I experienced that sinking feeling you get when you know you have conned yourself into doing something difficult and there's no going back.

The coward dies a thousand deaths, the valiant, only once!