Every day offers you 10,000 reasons to cry, but if you can find just one reason to laugh then you will be all right.
Poetry is music written for the human voice.
At our best, we are all teachers.
I think that that’s the wisest thing – to prevent illness before we try to cure something.
Children’s talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives.
Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.
I have found that among its other benefits, giving liberates the soul of the giver.
In order to win, we pay with energy and effort and discipline. If we lose, we pay in disappointment, discontent, and lack of fulfillment.
Life loves to be taken by the lapel and told: ‘I’m with you kid. Let’s go.’
You think you may not be heard. Speak anyway.
My life has been long, and believing that life loves the liver of it, I have dared to try many things, sometimes trembling, but daring still.
As far as I knew white women were never lonely, except in books. White men adored them, Black men desired them and Black women worked for them.
The love of the family, the love of one person can heal. It heals the scars left by a larger society. A massive, powerful society.
Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future and renders the present inaccessible.
It is impossible to struggle for civil rights, equal rights for blacks, without including whites. Because equal rights, fair play, justice, are all like the air: we all have it, or none of us has it. That is the truth of it.
I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I find myself.
It’s one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself, to forgive. Forgive everybody.
I’m grateful for being here, for being able to think, for being able to see, for being able to taste, for appreciating love – for knowing that it exists in a world so rife with vulgarity, with brutality and violence, and yet love exists. I’m grateful to know that it exists.
Easy reading is damn hard writing. But if it’s right, it’s easy. It’s the other way round, too. If it’s slovenly written, then it’s hard to read. It doesn’t give the reader what the careful writer can give the reader.
We must be warriors in the struggle against ignorance.