The older we get the less afraid we are.

Forgiveness works two ways, in most instances. People have to forgive themselves too. The powerful have to forgive themselves for their behavior. That should be a sacred process.

So much of life, it seems to me, is determined by pure randomness.

I learned to hear silence. That's the kind of life I lived: simple. I learned to see things in people around me, in my mom, dad, brothers and sisters.

You don't have to become something you're not to be better than you were.

I want my great-granddaughter to have a fairly good understanding of the world in which I lived for 81 years and also the world before I came into it - all the way back a hundred thousand years, to the beginning of our species.

I was fortunate enough to have been raised to a certain point before I got into the race thing. I had other views of what a human is, so I was never able to see racism as the big question. Racism was horrendous, but there were other aspects to life.