“My color is my joy and not my burden.”

Knowing who you are begins in the mind.

People of color, particularly African Americans, feel the stigma more keenly. In a race-conscious society, some don’t want to be perceived as having yet another deficit.

The music was as much a gift as sunshine, as rain, as any blessing ever prayed for.

Once my loved one accepted the diagnosis, healing began for the entire family, but it took too long. It took years.

Can’t we, as a nation, begin to speed up that process? We need a national campaign to destigmatize mental illness, especially one targeted toward African Americans.

Discipline is the servant of inspiration.

You live your life between your ears.

As I grow older part of my emotional survival plan must be to actively seek inspiration instead of passively waiting for it to find me.

Race, redemption and healing – thats my thing.

The message must go on billboards and in radio and TV public service announcements. It must be preached from pulpits and discussed in community forums. It’s not shameful to have a mental illness. Get treatment. Recovery is possible.

Forgiveness is the key to the recovery of the soul.

African Americans know about racism, but I don’t think we really know the causes. I decided it’s first of all a family problem.

When we finally stop asking America to love us and begin to love ourselves, we will prosper as a people.

Painting cannot be the only activity of a mature artist.

There is an eighth color that we don’t have the sense apparatus to see or experience.

I am also a painter. I paint the hearts of people with colors of spirituality.

She wanted more, more slang, more figures of speech, the bee’s knees, the cats pajamas, horse of a different color, dog-tired, she wanted to talk like she was born here, like she never came from anywhere else

Searching for a mind long lost I found it shaping colors and history near the cliffs of your heart.

Beneath the armor of skin/and/bone/and/mind most of our colors are amazingly the same.

Dreams dress us carefully in the colors of power and faith.

The death of a dream can in fact serve as the vehicle that endows it with new form, with reinvigorated substance, a fresh flow of ideas, and splendidly revitalized color.