I have a lot of faith in us. I have a lot of faith in humanity. It's based, though, on my own life; I've come too far to be a pessimist.

Eventually I knew what hair wanted; it wanted to be itself ... to be left alone by anyone, including me, who did not love it as it was.

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.

Expecting anything, living frugally in surprise.

But I don't know how to fight. All I know how to do is stay alive.

As we talked of freedom and justice one day for all, we sat down to steaks. I am eating misery, I thought, as I took the first bite. And spit it out.

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.