Listen, God loves everything you love, and a mess of stuff you don't.

Man corrupt everything, say Shug. He on your box of grits, in your head, and all over the radio. He try to make you think he everywhere. Soon as you think he everywhere, you think he God. But he ain't. Whenever you trying to pray, and man plop himself on the other end of it, tell him to git lost, say Shug. Conjure up the flowers, wind, water, a big rock.

As long as the Earth can make a spring every year, I can.

In South Korea, they believe that when you turn 60, you've become a baby again and the rest of your life should be totally about joy and happiness, and people should leave you alone, and I just think that that's the height of intelligence.

Sometimes, reading a blog, which I do infrequently, I see that generations of Americans have been wilfully crippled, and can no longer spell or write a sentence.

I think we have to own the fears that we have of each other, and then, in some practical way, some daily way, figure out how to see people differently than the way we were brought up to.

I think there is a sense of being forced at this time to look at America's really large shadow and that's not all that bad.