Terry McMillan

“ Being a lifetime wife and mother has afforded me the luxury of having multiple careers: I've been a teacher. A chauffeur. A chef. An interior decorator. A landscape architect, as well as a gardener. I’ve been a painter. A personal shopper. An accountant and a banker. I’ve been a beautician. Santa Claus. The Tooth Fairy. A movie reviewer. A nurse. A psychologist. A negotiator. An I have a Ph. D in How to Pretend Like You Don’t Mind.”

“happiness aint got no Ph.D. or no certain amount of zeroes behind it!”

“don't sabotage your own greatness by succumbing to failure!”

“money does not guarantee happiness or peace of mind, it can take your mind off things, distract you, but it can't replace the generic stuff a person needs!”

“life is like a jigsaw puzzle, you have to see the whole picture, then put it together piece by piece!”

“It goes without saying that your friends are usually the first to discuss your personal business behind your back.”

“I like to think of what happens to characters in good novels and stories as knots--things keep knotting up. And by the end of the story--readers see an unknotting of sorts. Not what you expect, not the easy answers you get on TV, not wash and wear philosophies, but a reproduction of believable, emotional experiences.”

“Don't worry about how pretty (the story) sounds, how lilting it is, and the imagery, and the metaphor, all that. Most readers don't care. It's the people in your book that matter.”

“Too many of us are hung up on what we don't have, can't have, or won't ever have. We spend too much energy being down, when we could use that same energy – if not less of it – doing, or at least trying to do, some of the things we really want to do.”

“Men cheat. They lie. They love porn. The don't respect you and don't care if they hurt you. It's the fucking breaks. Women divorce 'em 'cause we can't tame 'em or train 'em or control 'em like we do household pets. End of story.”

“I don't care if he never becomes my boyfriend or my husband, i just want him to be legitimate.”

“At least be a nice lesbian or you're going to give the rest a bad rap.”

“Gay is the new straight, in case you haven't noticed.”

“They're bored with their boring husbands who are workaholics like my dad. They're bored with their boring lives, sick of us kids and all this puberty and rebelling, so they pop pills all day long and shop and watch the soaps, and then when it all starts to fall apart they realize they just want to be happy again, so they go to rehab to clean up their act and then start fresh. Can you relate?”

“Look, as my mama always said, 'One monkey don't stop no show.”

“I hope you meet somebody and get married and then they fucking disappoint you and you have to go through a divorce, and then maybe you'll get it.”

“Because after my marriage fell apart I felt like an empty parking space, and James just pulled into it.”

“We get divorce, we get conned, someone we love dies, or we can't find anybody to love us or somebody breaks our heart and we realize this fairy tale ain't fair. So we suffer.”

“I been saying it for years: church is full of sneaky men posing as honest souls, and they are perpetuators our here looking for women just like you, with giant holes in your hearts, and they can smell when you got a good job and when you lonely as hell.”

“What I do know is sometimes we love the wrong people and sometimes we marry them.”

“Okay, so I lied about my age. Everybody does.”

“Their young live were over, too, except they had to die everyday while still breathing.”

“I want to push the fast-forward button until I get back to happy.”

“We never thought some guy would deliberately fill our hearts with brown sugar and then pour hot water all over it.”

“You've been killing me inside and I don't want to die like this.”

“Folks want to glow, to leave their worries and dead skin behind.”

“The best rush in the world is getting something at 80 percent off.”

“Back then I confused passions and orgasms with love. It look me years to realize the two weren't synonymous.”

“I was tired of chasing ghosts, hollow men who were outside my comfort zone, men who had nothing to give me except a rush. It was all I asked for, and all I ever got.”

“I've got tons of irreplaceable information inside the soul of this computer.”

“I'm not trying to be a middle aged centerfold, I just want to look at myself naked and not be disgusted.”

“Now, I've been known to be attractive on special occasions, and I do my best to project as much beauty as I can muster from deep inside, though I often fail.”

“I had been on a whole lot of folks' prayer lists and God had known for years my address was still 111 Unlucky-in-LOve-Avenue.”