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.

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.

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

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.

Many people who have money does not realize that God has blessed them with it for a completely different purpose

The truth is dark under your eyelids.

The mother's love is at first an absorbing delight, blunting all other sensibilities; it is an expansion of the animal existence.

The devil himself can become beauty, so we are told, to corrupt mankind." (Marco)

A lot of jazz is like that; it sells over a period of time.

Lovers communicate not inside sentences, but between them. Passion lurks within interstice. It is grouting rather than bricks.

I call my brother 'Sun' cause he shine like one.

The truth of the matter is that muggers are very interesting people.

God loves you just because He loves you.

I think the fact that we have been focussing on politics quite a lot and the tumult of politics rather than what we should be doing in terms of policy has made, I think, voters quite grumpy.