“As life in general constituted much pain in the form of struggles against poverty, disease, ignorance, and emotional anguish,”

Hope drowned in shadows emerges fiercely splendid–– boldly angelic.

They may have for their lives, or, exercising sufficient strength of will to make those dreams a reality.

Groping their way through suffocating shadows of political turmoil, economic oppression, military mayhem, starvation, and disease.

Writing for me is a form of spiritual discipline and creative vision, a means of being in the world and giving one’s love to it without compromise or dilution.

First gave in to the urge to pray to their sense of something greater than themselves and interpreted certain signs or events or silences as responses to those prayers.

Know yourself fearlessly (even quietly) for all the things you are.

A horn of plenty spills from your hands into the starved lives of millions.

Unless you are here: this garden refuses to exist. Pink dragonflies fall from the air and become scorpions scratching blood out of rocks.

Someone had to embrace positive beginnings before anyone could celebrate successful conclusions or continuations.

Art gives its vision to beauty not always recognized. And it surrenders freely — whatever power it possesses to every sincere soul that seeks it. But above all else–it presents us with the gift of ourselves.

Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela might be measured in part by the profound and unique gestures made by people in different countries to honor his life upon learning of his death.

With its leaves so rich and heavy with elation and its crimson face made brighter with visions of divinity the shadow of a certain rose looks just like an angel eating light.

The singular historic moment millions now celebrate could have been tragically lost to guerrilla decontextualization.

Yet continuously occupies the same bed or pathway, and accommodates life’s endings with the same musical grace with which it accommodates

Operating to implement a balance and give us an opportunity to turn the horrors we’ve forced upon each other into something more conducive to sustaining at least minimal degrees of sanity and love.

An outrageous instinct to love and be loved executed your brain every hour on the hour.

Every life is in many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves.

When I was a boy, I laid in my twin-sized bed and wondered where my brother was.

Gucci Mane is my brother, Birdman also, we’re working together but it is a form of brotherhood. We’re friends but there is no need to contract. In a sense, I’m signed on their labels, but there is no lawyer, no contract.

Muslims should live like brothers.

People are of two types, they are either your brothers in faith or your equals in humanity.

Every one of us should be ashamed to be free while his brother is a slave.

There is not a woman born who desires to eat the bread of dependence, no matter whether it be from the hand of father, husband, or brother; for anyone who does so eat her bread places herself in the power of the person from whom she takes it.

We must continue to go forward as one people, as brothers and sisters.