You can take from every experience what it has to offer you. And you cannot be defeated if you just keep taking one breath followed by another.

When I didn't have friends, I had books.

Forgiveness is giving up the hope that the past could have been any different.

I truly understand that there is a lesson in everything that happens to us. So I tried not to spend my time asking "Why did this happen to me?" but trying to figure out why I had chosen this.

I tried to empty myself and let the spirit of Sethe inhabit me.

Don't live your life to please other people.

I did not believe what I was told about being poor and black and female in Mississippi in 1954.