I turned my pain into art and my hard work into a career. Helping myself has helped others. helping others has helped me.

We are taught to view pain as an enemy, not a teacher. But pain is the right hand of growth and transformation. Pain is in the history of all human wisdom.

I make such a good statistic, somebody should study me now; somebody's gotta be interested in how I feel, just cause I'm here, and I'm real.

I walk like I'm on a mission 'cause that's the way I groove. I got more and more to do and less and less to prove.

I'm aware enough, I guess, of American labor history.

Like a lot of people, I had this naive hope that Barack Obama would fix everything quickly. You know, the culture of celebrity in this country leads us away from democratic ways of thinking and into this hero worship. And so of course, one man cannot swoop in and fix everything on his own. It's much more complicated and difficult than that, and progressives in this country since then have had to come to terms with the fact that we need to do more than actually get out of our house and vote. It's an ongoing process to turn the tide.

I did a lot of work with myself over the course of being pregnant and the first few months of being pregnant. It's nice, the pace of being pregnant; it gives you a long time to not just germinate a baby but germinate the mother that you're gonna be.