You die - and this is why manmade religions don't work for so many of us. The notion that you're dead and that's the end, and they even try to contain you in coffins. They make them out of steel and stuff. But really, your journey - for all you know - is just beginning. For all I know, what you see now is just a tiny little seed. So, I may blossom into an entire - I don't know - something in the sky. Who knows where we're going?

Whoever you are, whatever you are, start with that, whether salt of the earth or only white sugar.

It is justice and respect that I want the world to dust off and put - without delay, and with tenderness - back on the head of the Palestinian child. It will be imperfect justice and respect because the injustice and disrespect have been so severe. But I believe we are right to try.

'Thank you' is the best prayer that anyone could say. I say that one a lot. Thank you expresses extreme gratitude, humility, understanding.

You are saying, are you not, I said to Manuelito, that stories have more room in them than ideas? [...] He laughed. That is correct, Señor. It is as if ideas are made of blocks. Rigid and hard. And stories are made of a gauze that is elastic. You can almost see through it, so what is beyond is tantalizing. You can't quite make it out; and because the imagination is always moving forward, you yourself are constantly stretching. Stories are the way spirit is exercised.

My God is not a religious God. My God is nature, my God is everything there is. That's God. Everything is God. I'm a child of that.

What did it mean for a black woman to be an artist in our grandmothers' time? In our great-grandmothers' day? It is an answer cruel enough to stop the blood.