“The remainder of my schooldays were no more auspicious than the first. Indeed, they were an endless Project that slowly evolved into a Unit, in which miles of construction paper and wax crayon were expended by the State of Alabama in its well-meaning but fruitless efforts to teach me Group Dynamics.”

“One way to see the constructed nature of reality is to notice how the definitions of different "races" change historically, by including groups at one time that were excluded in another. The Irish, for example, were long considered by the dominant white Anglo-Saxon Protestants of England and the United States to be members of a nonwhite "race", as were Italians, Jews, and people from a number of Eastern European countries. As such, immigrants from these groups to England and the United States were excluded and subjugated and exploited in much the same way that blacks were.”

“According to 2008/09 census there were 61,080,000 dogs in the United States. Many homeless or mistreated. There are more pet dogs than babies in the world.”

“You've turned my wounds into wisdom. Teaching me to learn from my mistakes. Which ones were mine and which were out of my control.”

“You are an endless project...changing, evolving, surprising.”

“Nothing is more painful to me than the disdain with which people treat second-rate authors, as if there were room only for the first-raters.”