Don’t worry about what people think, because once it’s all over the people who love you will make you what they want you to be, and the people who don’t love you will, too.

It is a common condition of being poor...you are always afraid that the good things in your life are temporary, that someone can take them away, because you have no power beyond your own brute strength to stop them.

The Haitians, who knew something about suffering and survival, had a beautiful phrase... The Translation is not perfect, but the nut of it was: 'The season of pain is never over until the sky begins to cry.

It wasn't that I had gotten it right . . . but that I had gotten true.

The only thing poverty does is grind down your nerve endings to a point that you can work harder and stoop lower than most people are willing to. It chips away a person's dreams to the point that the hopelessness shows through, and the dreamer accepts that hard work and borrowed houses are all this life will ever be.

This is home and home is not something you remember, it is something you see every day and every moment.

You do not hate the time you waste; it evokes a much more passive emotion than that. You only wish you had it back, like a quarter in an unlucky slot machine.