When someone who's always been in your life is gone, it's a stunning adjustment of your own identity.

I wanted a racially just society. I wanted to end wars. I wanted to end white supremacy. I wanted to create a world that was based on egalitarianism, sharing, racial justice.

I was a child of privilege and I woke up to a world on fire.

I'm an optimist in my heart - I'm a hopeless pollyanna just like my mother - but a pessimist in my head. I think that's the dialectic we all need to be in.

Nothing is more boring than some old person going on and on about the way things used to be.

One of the things that's complicated about writing anything is that it's an act of narcissism, and then of course once it sails out into the world, you have to let go of it.

That's in the nature of social change. So you can analyze what didn't work, but it's very hard to predict what will work.