“It was wrong then—for a stupid black city girl to fall in love with a smart southern white boy. But watching him chase the ball until he was right in front of me, I was enamored.”

“Most, I loved James Baldwin's essays. There was to a Baldwin essay a metropolitan elegance I envied, a refusal of the livid. In Baldwin I found a readiness to rise to prophetic wrath, something like those ministers, and yet, once more, to bend down in tenderness, to call grown men and women "baby" (a whiff of the theater). Watching Baldwin on television—I will always consider the fifties to have been a sophisticated time—fixed for me what being a writer must mean. Arching eyebrows intercepted ironies, parenthetically declared fouls; mouthfuls of cigarette smoke shot forth ribbons of exactitude.”

“i finally got t this place were it feel right were i knew i belong were i didn't give crap maybe is not the right place but i feel save”

“Look what love does...This was the real Islam, the Islam of love, not hate. Muhammad would be proud.”

“There are always going to be some people in life who disappoint you and don't believe in you like you hoped they would, and you have to find the strength to rise about it and realize that they're wrong. You're still a worthy person whether they thing so or not. If there's no one else to tell it to you, then tell it to yourself.”

“These new people were her people. So what that she'd only recently met these women. In their hearts they were all the same: women yearning for rich lives, someone to love & someone to love them in return, friends to laugh with, drink with & cry with.”

“This morning I wake to the blue-white light of an approaching spring in New York: the kind of light that promises it will not be this cold forever.”