I have never felt that the one thing that I am 'known for' is what I am.

I love the natural world - it comes from my culture, which grew out of a people enslaved.

I feel very happy to be living in Berkeley because there are a lot of people who are politically active here.

I can be almost terminally grief-stricken because things are so dire, but at the same time, there's a real lightheartedness about just the recoverability of life, of how things...

For a long time, I thought I was ugly and disfigured. This made me shy and timid, and I often reacted to insults that were not intended.

Clearly older women and especially older women who have led an active life or elder women who successfully maneuver through their own family life have so much to teach us about...

America is not nearly done. We're only in the beginning. Who knows who we will be? Who knows... what color we will be? It is all something that, maybe, our descendants - if they...

What the mind doesn't understand, it worships or fears.

Nobody is as powerful as we make them out to be.

As you know from school, it's when you have not prepared for the test that you have the fear of failing. And if you have prepared, even if you fail, you've done your best.

And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see - or like a...

The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for white, or women created for men.

Yes, Mother. I can see you are flawed. You have not hidden it. That is your greatest gift to me.

In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they're still beautiful.

The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any.

How simple a thing it seems to me that to know ourselves as we are, we must know our mothers names.

People do not wish to appear foolish; to avoid the appearance of foolishness, they are willing to remain actually fools.

Sometimes, reading a blog, which I do infrequently, I see that generations of Americans have been wilfully crippled, and can no longer spell or write a sentence.

Horses make a landscape look beautiful.

It no longer bothers me that I may be constantly searching for father figures; by this time, I have found several and dearly enjoyed knowing them