“Many friends have expressed concern that a religious fanatic will try to kill me when I go to Africa. After all, I’ll be speaking out against a crime many fundamentalists consider a holy practice. I’m sure my work will be dangerous, and I admit to being scared…. But my faith tells me to be strong, that God led me down this path for a reason. He has work for me to do. This is my mission. And I believe that long before the day I was born, God chose the day I will die, so I can’t change that. In the meantime, I might as well take a chance, because that’s what I’ve done all my life.”

“I know that, like many other writers, I have many faults, for I am the first to be dissatisfied with myself . . . At the moment when I am trying to review my life's work, I often realize with pain that I have literally failed to express one-twentieth part of what I had wanted to, and perhaps could have expressed. The thing that comforts me is the constant hope that one day God will grant me so much inspiration . . . that I shall be able to express myself more fully, that, in short, I shall express all that is locked in my heart and in my imagination . . . I cannot help feeling that there is much more hidden in me than I have hitherto been able to express as a writer. And yet, speaking without false modesty, there is a great deal that is true and that came from my heart in what I have expressed already.”

“My friends tell me I am strong, decisive, and wise. What a joke. Where is my strength tonight? Where is my wisdom? Ironically, they tell me I am ‘so open’. Me, who has so many secrets that I have never shared. The irony would be funny if it wasn't so sad. Their blindness to my true self makes me feel invisible. Not in the way that a spirit or ghost is invisible, for I am most definitely flesh, blood, sinew, and bone. I even have a mind that works nimble and fast, and a mouth that speaks reasonably eloquently, when I feel I have something worthwhile to say. No, I’m invisible because the people who populate my life either do not, or cannot, see the real me. Of course, that is but another irony. I know much of my invisibility is of my own doing, and that is the last joke on myself: that which I seek is also that which I fear.”

“I was never really certain why he scared the bejesus out of me. Nothing scared me growing up. I’ve been playing with dead people since the day I was born, so it’s good thing, yet the Big Bad scared me. Which brings me to the reason I called.” “Which was to give me nightmares for the rest of my life?” “Oh, no, that’s just a plus. Why was I so scared of him?” “Hon, for one thing he was this powerful, massive, black smokelike being.”“So, you’re saying I’m a racist?”

“If I could give you information of my life it would be to show how a woman of very ordinary ability has been led by God in strange and unaccustomed paths to do in His service what He has done in her. And if I could tell you all, you would see how God has done all, and I nothing. I have worked hard, very hard, that is all; and I have never refused God anything.”

“This is not to say, there never comes a day I'll take my chances and start again. And when I look behind on all my younger times, I'll have to thank the wrongs that led me to a love so strong.”