The requirements of romantic love are difficult to satisfy in the back seat of a Dodge Dart.

Any mother could perform the jobs of several air-traffic controllers with ease.

That's the risk you take if you change: that people you've been involved with won't like the new you. But other people who do will come along.

Just as you began to feel that you could make good use of time, there was no time left to you.

A snake will always be a snake, even if you put a chain around its neck and try to make it walk upright.

Inspiration never arrived when you were searching for it.

One didn't issue instructions to comets. Grown children did what they had to do, and parents could only grit their teeth and watch and pray for them to get through it.

What a surprise to find you could shift the contents of your head like rearranging furniture in a room.

If this was adulthood the only improvement she could detect in her situation was that she could now eat dessert without eating her vegetables.

Dying was apparently a weaning process; all the attachments to familiar people and objects have to be undone.

The man who has no inner life is a slave of his surroundings, as the barometer is the obedient servant of the air.

Out here on the water, it’s a fine line between feeling in control and losing it altogether.

no one could ever push you to write or become a writer, except yourself.

That hug was my little peace of heaven.

If your level of anger or bitterness is not leading to a change in your life or relationship, it is because your ego is dominating.

When a child is in crisis, parents should have a role and a voice. They should be the first to help, not the last to know.

The painful secret of gods and kings is that men are free, Aegistheus. You know it and they do not.

When you get up in the morning, you merely put on your clothes. When a colored man gets up in the morning, he puts on his armor.

I relate to hustlers who want to get out of where they are and create something different for themselves.

Black Poetry is not for Black People...it is for everybody

There is nothing wrong with America that Americans can't fix.