“If I am not good to myself, how can I expect anyone else to be good to me?”

“While I know myself as a creation of God, I am also obligated to realize and remember that everyone else and everything else are also God's creation.”

“When I am writing, I am trying to find out who I am, who we are, what we're capable of, how we feel, how we lose and stand up, and go on from darkness into darkness. I'm trying for that. But I'm also trying for the language. I'm trying to see how it can really sound. I really love language. I love it for wate it does for us, how it allows us to explain the pain and the glory, the nuances and delicacies of our existence. And then it allows us to laugh, allows us to show wit. Real wit is shown in language. We need language.”

“I find relief from the questions only when I concede that I am not obliged to know everything. I remind myself it is sufficient to know what I know, and that what I know, may not always be true.”

“I am a WomanPhenomenally.Phenomenal Woman,that's me.”

“Some people cannot see a good thing when it is right here, right now. Others can sense a good thing coming when it is days, months, or miles away.”

“When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature. If I were a young person today, trying to gain a sense of myself in the world, I would do that again by reading, just as I did when I was young.”