“What do you want to be when you grow up? As if growing up is finite. As if at some point you become something and that’s the end.”

You find ways to adapt. If you’re in it forever, there’s really no choice.

No one, I realized, was going to look out for me unless I pushed for it.

My daughters are the heart of my heart and the center of my world.

Failure is a feeling long before it becomes an actual result

Fulfillment, I’m sure, struck her as a rich person’s conceit.

As a kid, you learn to measure long before you understand the size or value of anything. Eventually, if you’re lucky, you learn that you’ve been measuring all wrong.

Friendships between women, as any woman will tell you, are built of a thousand small kindnesses, swapped back and forth and over again.

It was painful, but time pushed us all forward.

It’s remarkable how a stereotype functions as an actual trap. How many angry black women have been caught in the circular logic of that phrase? When you aren’t being listened to, why wouldn’t you get louder? If you’re written off as angry or emotional, doesn’t that just cause more of the same?

You can’t make decisions based on fear and the possibility of what might happen.

I grew up with a disabled dad in a too-small house with not much money in a starting-to-fail neighborhood, and I also grew up surrounded by love and music in a diverse city in a country where an education can take you far. I had nothing or I had everything. It depends on which way you want to tell it.

Hearing them, I realized that they weren’t at all smarter than the rest of us. They were simply emboldened, floating on an ancient tide of superiority, buoyed by the fact that history had never told them anything different.

The burden of assimilation is put largely on the shoulders of minority students.

What I notice about men, all men, is that their order is me, my family, God is in there somewhere, but me is first.

Empower yourselves with a good education, then get out there and use that education to build a country worthy of your boundless promise.

My most important title is still mom-in-chief. My daughters are still the heart of my heart and the center of my world.

Meditation is painful in the beginning but it bestows immortal Bliss and supreme joy in the end.

Whether you end up convinced or not, you will never think about American national security the same way ever again.

There’s always gonna be people that are scared of it. But at the end of the day you give those bullies, those people, that are so ignorant, if you give them the power to affect you, you’re letting them win

It has long seemed ridiculous to me to suppose that the nature of things has been so poor and stingy that it provided souls only to such a trifling mass of bodies on our globe, like human bodies, when it could have given them to all, without interfering with its other ends.

When you go out with your crew of friends and you get into trouble, at the end of the night when you come home, you’re still the same crew of friends. It’s just the story that you have to tell.

So much pain. So many lives. Their darkness must end.

Start with the end in mind. If you want to be a millionaire, talk like one, act like one, work like one.

Thinking that what you want equals what’s best for you is a dead end.