There is a lot of ignorance, and I don't mean intellectual ignorance. I mean people think that if you get something, it will take away from what I have. It's just ignorance.

The most difficult thing in the world, it seems to me, is to realize that I am a child of God; to keep that in my mind all the time.

Always in the black spirituals there's that promise that things are going to be better, by and by.

There is a kind of strength that is almost frightening in Black women. It's as if a steel rod runs right through the head down to the feet.

I've tried to be totally present, so that when I'm finished with a piece of work, I'm finished. ... The work, once completed, does not need me. The work I'm working on needs my total concentration. The one that's finished doesn't belong to me anymore. It belongs to itself.

We all have that possibility, that potential and that promise of seeing beyond the seeming.

Your life is much more important that you can imagine... it is your first treasure.