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.

No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.

As you know from school, it's when you have not prepared for the test that you have the fear of failing. And if you have prepared, even if you fail, you've done your best.

The long-term accommodation that protects marriage and other such relationships is ... forgetfulness.

... my mother adorned with flowers whatever shabby house we were forced to live in.

No song or poem will bear my mother's name. Yet so many of the stories that I write, that we all write, are my mother's stories.

My parents taught me service - not by saying, but by doing. That was my culture, the culture of my family.