Joy in looking and comprehending is nature’s most beautiful gift.

One must take what nature gives as one finds it.

I’m tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep. That’s deep enough. What do you want — an adorable pancreas?

That’s always seemed so ridiculous to me, that people want to be around someone because they’re pretty. It’s like picking your breakfeast cereals based on color instead of taste.

Summer afternoon — summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.

Even with all of the things that are so awful, if you walk into your yard and stay there looking at almost anything for five minutes, you will be stunned by how marvelous life is and how incredibly lucky we are to have it.

My mother says I was writing before I was crawling. I wrote in the dirt with a twig.

It’s a good thing that beauty is only skin deep, or I’d be rotten to the core.

My mother had bought a sewing machine for me. When I went away to college, she gave me a sewing machine, a typewriter and a suitcase, and my mother made $17 a week working as a maid 12 hours a day, and she did that for me.

I deeply regret any harm, or any perceived harm, that I may have done to anyone by any behaviour of mine.

I think many people in my community had very different kinds of mothers: they had mothers who acquiesced in the system of male and white-supremacist domination, and my mother never did. She just could not do it. It just wasn't in her.

I'm still living at least five parallel lives, honestly! I wonder about it. I have no idea how that happens.

I think war is so incredibly backward, and I don't think it's intelligent, and it's not sane. So why would you want to support it?

We must, all of us, learn actually not to have enemies, but only confused adversaries who are ourselves in disguise.

There are no bad pictures; that’s just how your face looks sometimes.

It’s never too late for a new beginning in your life.

My family was a poor farming family, and we lived under absolute segregation.

In every man’s heart there is a secret nerve that answers to the vibrations of beauty.

We have to wake up. We have to refuse to be a clone.

You cannot see the changes that you're dreaming about, because they're internal.

Since the time of the witch burnings, the grandmothers and the healers and the midwives have been systematically targeted. And burned at the stake for hundreds of years, decimating whole communities.

For me, I used to be shy towards journalism because it wasn't poetry. And then I realized that the events that I covered in essays that became journalism were actually great because they inspired me, and they became my muse.

I never talk about my next project.

We must begin seeing other creatures as equal. Existence makes us all equal.