No one will love you more than you love your pain.

All anyone can hope for is just a tiny bit of love, like a drop in a cup if you can get it, or a waterfall, a flood, if you can get that too.

Love is like the rain. It comes in a drizzle sometimes. Then it starts pouring and if you're not careful it will drown you.

Create dangerously, for people who read dangerously. ... Writing, knowing in part that no matter how trivial your words may seem, someday, somewhere, someone may risk his or her life to read them.

There is a frustration too, that at moments when there's not a coup, when there are not people in the streets, that the country disappears from people's consciousness.

When you write ,it's like braiding your hair. Taking a handful of coarse unruly strands and attempting to bring then unity.

It's not easy to start over in a new place,' he said. 'Exile is not for everyone. Someone has to stay behind, to receive the letters and greet family members when they come back.

People are just too hopeful, and sometimes hope is the biggest weapon of all to use against us. People will believe anything.

I think Haiti is a place that suffers so much from neglect that people only want to hear about it when it’s at its extreme. And that’s what they end up knowing about it.

Toni Cade Bambara said: “Writing is the way I participate in the struggle.”

Misery won't touch you gentle. It always leaves its thumbprints on you; sometimes it leaves them for others to see, sometimes for nobody but you to know of.

Effective leadership is doing important things first. Effective management is knowing what is important.

To refrain from storytelling is perhaps one of the highest forms of respect we can pay. Those people, with no stories to circle them, can die without being misunderstood.

While armchair travelers dream of going places, traveling armchairs dream of staying put.

The airplane has unveiled for us the true face of the earth.

Furthermore, when there is cheating, the cheating needs to be called. And I see that the administration has become much more aggressive on that front [of retraining people who get displaced].

I've always thought that very few people grow old as admirably as academics. At least books never let them down.

No man can enjoy happiness without thinking that he enjoys it.

You really do kind of learn a lot about a person when you watch and listen to the songs that mean something to them.

Either we change our ways, especially the United States, or we will continue to lead the world in heart disease and cancer.