We can all learn from every text. Reading the work that disgusts you can only strengthen your core beliefs. I could teach a semester-long course based only on reading the local telephone book. All stories can be taught in valuable ways.

Spiritual matters should be private.

I end up feeling like a spy in the house of ethnicity, you know? Because people will talk around me as they would talk around the people in their cultural group. So I get to hear all the secrets and jokes and you know, I'm a part of every community because of the way I look.

They put me in a holding cell with a black kid and a white kid and a Chinese kid. We're the United Nations of juvenile delinquents.

I recognize now that the conditions that Indians are living in are the conditions that poor people everywhere are living in.

I don't know what any individual should do about crossing her own borders. I only know that I live a happier, more adventurous life, by crossing borders.

We only know how to lose and be lost.