“It felt perverse, how the world just carried on. How everyone was still here, except for my Suzanne.”

His money went largely toward books, which to him were like sacred objects, providing ballast for his mind.

We were planting seeds of change, the fruit of which we might never see. We had to be patient.

It’s easier to hold onto your own stereotypes and misconceptions, it makes you feel justified in your own ignorance. That’s America. So the challenge for us is, are we ready for change?

For me, marriage was more like a full-on merger, a reconfiguring of two lives into one, with the well-being of a family taking precedence over any one agenda or goal.

there’s no straight line between effort and reward.

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.

We should always endeavor to wonder at the permanent thing, not at the mere exception. We should be startled by the sun, and not by the eclipse. We should wonder less at the earthquake, and wonder more at the earth.

All of our people all over the country-except the pure-blooded Indians-are immigrants or descendants of immigrants, including even those who came over here on the Mayflower.

I have come to accept that if I have a new haircut it is front page news. But having a picture of my foot on the front page of a national newspaper is a bit exceptional.

Anxiety is the greatest evil that can befall a soul, except sin. God commands you to pray, but He forbids you to worry.

Everything from the little house was in the wagon, except the beds and tables and chairs. They did not need to take these, because Pa could always make new ones.

Every Christian needs a half-hour of prayer each day, except when he is busy, then he needs an hour.

Modern dance isn’t anything except one thing in my mind: the freedom of women in America.

Let the enemy rage at the gate; let him knock, pound, scream, howl; let him do his worst. We know for certain that he cannot enter our soul except by the door of our consent.