The question is not how to survive, but how to thrive with passion, compassion, humor and style.

Women should be tough, tender, laugh as much as possible, and live long lives.

Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future and renders the present inaccessible.

Surviving is important. Thriving is elegant.

Life is pure adventure, and the sooner we realize that, the quicker we will be able to treat life as art.

Success is loving life and daring to live it.

I make writing as much a part of my life as I do eating or listening to music.

To grow up is to stop putting blame on parents

All knowledge is spendable currency, depending on the market.

You can only become great at something you are willing to sacrifice for

Each time a woman stands up for herself, without knowing it possibly, without claiming it, she stands up for all women.

Light and shadow are opposite sides of the same coin. We can illuminate our paths or darken our way. It is a matter of choice.

I had read a Tale of Two Cities and found it up to my standards as a romantic novel. She opened the first page and I heard poetry for the first time in my life...her voice slid in and curved down trough and over the words. She was nearly singing.

The needs of a society determine its ethics, and in the Black American ghettos the hero is that man who is offered only the crumbs from his country's table but by ingenuity and courage is able to take for himself a Lucullan feast. Hence the janitor who lives in one room but sports a robin's-egg-blue Cadillac is not laughed at but admired, and the domestic who buys forty-dollar shoes is not criticized but is appreciated. We know that they have put to use their full mental and physical powers. Each single gain feeds into the gains of the body collective.

On the day of your birth, the Creator filled countless storehouses, set aside for your use and yours alone.

I couldn't tell fact from fiction, Or if the dream was true My only sure prediction In this world was you. I'd touch your features inchly. Beard love and dared the cost, The sented spiel reeled me unreal And I found my senses lost.

Of all the needs (there are none imaginary) a lonely child has, the one that must be satisfied, if there is going to be hope and a hope of wholeness, is the unshaking need for an unshakable God. My pretty Black brother was my Kingdom Come.

Until recently each generation found it more expedient to plead guilty to the charge of being young and ignorant, easier to take the punishment meted out by the older generation (which had itself confessed to the same crime short years before). The command to grow up at once was more bearable than the faceless horror of wavering purpose, which was youth.

The dread of futility has been my life-long plague.

Be wary when a naked person offers you his shirt

The devil lives in our mistakes, the lord lives in our rights. Who lives in our ignorance, and who wins after all?

He was a simple man who had no inferiority complex about his lack of education, and even more amazing no superiority complex because he had succeeded despite that lack.

Faith is the evidence of the unseen.

Love costs all we are and will ever be. Yet it is only love which sets us free. A Brave and Startling Truth.