Where I grew up, it was all people who were black and Latino, people who look like me. Now I live in a neighborhood where very, very few people look like me.

Sometimes...you have to try to forget people you love just so you can keep living.

When you think of how a child experiences a series of events, it feels, for so long, like she's looking at everything from behind this glass and it's obscured.

Racism doesn't know color, death doesn't know age, and pain doesn't know might.

For me as a writer, it was understanding that we're so far behind in our way of dealing with death. We put someone in the ground, we bury them or we burn them, and then we're supposed to just move on and kind of get over it.

Don't trust women, my mother said to me. Even the ugly ones will take what you thought was yours.

Diversity is about all of us, and about us having to figure out how to walk through this world together.