Laugh and dare to try to love somebody, starting with yourself. You must love yourself first, of course, and you must protect yourself so that nobody overrides you, overrules you, or steps on you. Just say, 'Just a minute. I'm worth everything, dear.'

I couldn't tell fact from fiction, Or if the dream was true My only sure prediction In this world was you. I'd touch your features inchly. Beard love and dared the cost, The sented spiel reeled me unreal And I found my senses lost.

I want to write so well that a person is 30 or 40 pages in a book of mine ... before she realizes she's reading.

I think I know that I deserve better. And so I try for better. I'm never so put off that I would ever walk out of a place not having tried the best I could.

Among other things, I'm thinking "I'm a child of God." That's amazing. And "I'm not only a child of God, but God loves me." The hardest part for me is to realize that while God loves me, and I am a child of God, I have to see the bigot and the brute and the rapist, and whether he or she knows it or not, I have to know that that person is a child of God. That is part of the responsibility - and it's hard.

Tell the truth and not the facts.

I don't believe an accident of birth makes people sisters or brothers. It makes them siblings, gives them mutuality of parentage. Sisterhood and brotherhood is a condition people have to work at.