Books became my world because the world I was in was very hard.

I have learned not to worry about love; but to honor its coming with all my heart.

I feel that the ancestors are that covering that will cover me. I feel like I can only be enveloped in them spiritually and physically.

Some periods of our growth are so confusing that we don't even recognize that growth is happening...Those long periods when something inside ourselves seems to be waiting, holding its breath, unsure about what the next step should be, eventually become the periods we wait for, for it is in those periods that we realize that we are being prepared for the next phase of our life and that, in all probability, a new level of the personality is about to be revealed.

The gift of loneliness is sometimes a radical vision of society or one's people that has not previously been taken into account.

If I could live as a tree, as a river, as the moon, as the sun, as a star, as the earth, as a rock, I would. ...Writing permits me to experience life as any number of strange creations.

The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for white, or women created for men.