Our ancestors are an ever widening circle of hope.

American means white, and Africanist people struggle to make the term applicable to themselves with ethnicity and hyphen after hyphen after hyphen.

In my mother's church, everybody read the Bible and it was mostly about music. My mother had the most beautiful voice I have ever heard in my life. She could sing anything - classical, jazz, blues, opera. And people came from long distances to that little church she went to - African Methodist Episcopal, the AME church she belonged to - just hear her.

No gasp at a miracle that is truly miraculous because the magic lies in the fact that you knew it was there for you all along.

You have to be willing to think the unthinkable.

Clever, but schoolteacher beat him anyway to show him that definitions belonged to the definers - not the defined.

It seems to me everything Shakespeare did was political.