“American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.”

Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety.

I often wonder what I’d do if there weren’t any books in the world.

All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique.

The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world’s definitions.

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.

There is a fearful splendor in absolute desolation.

I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also so much more than that. So are we all.

Youth must be the worst time in anybody’s life.

It is very nearly impossible to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.

People don’t have any mercy. They tear you limb from limb, in the name of love.

People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead.

For these are all our children, we will all profit by or pay for what they become.

Artists are here to disturb the peace.

The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.

People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception.

No one is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart: for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.

There is no greater sorrow than that of a soul, moving through the tunnels of hope, holding on to the beautiful past while drowning in a pool of darkness all alone, all alone.

There’s beauty in the imperfections of what we do and our value’s so much more than being a size two.

And just like that, he told me that I was beautiful. Without knowing all the wars I wage against myself.

Down to the marrow in your bones, you will always be beautiful to me.

The fabric of your life is a beautiful tapestry of contrast.

You’re my crescent moon not perfect but beautiful.

Sun rising slowly, frost hanging in the plush air; The skies are ablaze.

Just because you haven’t seen how wonderful, beautiful, and special she is, doesn’t mean no one else will.