If you find it in your heart to care for somebody else, you will have succeeded.

My mother raised me, and then freed me.

Leaving behind nights of terror and fear, I rise. Into a daybreak that's wondrously clear, I rise.

Growing up at my grandmother's table, she always had rice. She might do something as exotic as potatoes or spaghetti, but there was still always rice, just in case you needed a little rice fix.

Children's talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives.

The black kids, the poor white kids, Spanish-speaking kids, and Asian kids in the US - in the face of everything to the contrary, they still bop and bump, shout and go to school somehow. Their optimism gives me hope.

Original thinking migrates each day in search of nourishment.