It's better to have your blackness taken away than to stand and lie about who you actually are.

Dear God...I have always been a good girl. Maybe you can give me a sign letting me know what is happening to me.

I'm mad about the waste that happens when people who love each other can't even bring themselves to talk.

Guided by my heritage of a love of beauty and a respect for strength - in search of my mother's garden, I found my own.

The Olinka girls do not believe girls should be educated. When I asked a mother why she thought this, she said: A girl is nothing to herself; only to her husband can she become something. What can she become? I asked. Why, she said, the mother of his children. But I am not the mother of anybody's children, I said, and I am something.

The hardest part is when you're in danger yourself. You have to face what could happen and might be likely to happen to you. It's not just that you're there standing next to somebody that something bad is likely to happen to. That is a true moment of reckoning with who you really are.

War is a dead end, literally. And, what is more, we simply can't afford it. Not morally, and not financially. How long will it take the citizens of the United States, one wonders, to recognize that the house their country bombed in Iraq is the same one they were living in until it was foreclosed?