Love is going to replace life and from then on it's all smooth sailing. Love will replace life.

I am a stranger to half measures. With life I am on the attack, restlessly ferreting out each pleasure, foraging for answers, wringing from it even the pain. I ransack life, hunt it down. I am the hungry peasants storming the palace gates. I will have my share. No matter how it tastes.

To my father, who told me the stories that matter. To my mother, who taught me to remember them.

I am a stranger to half measures.

My mother used to do all the things that were important to her after midnight. ... Sometimes I'd sneak downstairs and see her knitting, or reading, or writing letters. I'd think of her as a thief, stealing the tail end of the day, the hours nobody else wanted or used.

Racism is a virus. And since nobody's really looking too hard for a cure it reproduces itself over and over again.

I quickly learned that motherhood was a high wire act sometimes performed without a net.