I don't know any more about the future than you do. I hope that it will be full of work, because I have come to know by experience that work is the nearest thing to happiness that I can find. . . I want a busy life, a just mind and a timely death.

Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the granddaughter of slaves. It fails to register depression with me.

I been through living for years. I just ain't dead yet.

No man may make another free.

Like the dead-seeming, cold rocks, I have memories within that came out of the material that went to make me. Time and place have had their say.

There is a basin in the mind where words float around on thought and thought on sound and sight. Then there is a depth of thought untouched by words, and deeper still a gulf of formless feelings untouched by thought.

Grown people know that they do not always know the way of things, and even if they think they know, they do not know where and how they got the proof.