“I like the idea of being rigorous about friendship.”

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.

Everyone on Earth, they’d tell us, was carrying around an unseen history, and that alone deserved some tolerance.

Dominance, even the threat of it, is a form of dehumanization. It’s the ugliest kind of power.

The people we trust with important talk can help us know that we are not alone.

A blow from your friend is better than a kiss from your enemy.

You don’t need everyone but just the few that will stick with you at all times.

It has been the craziest year filled with so many adventures, amazing friends, accomplishments & memories.

A speaker of truth has no friends.

Friends show their love in times of trouble, not in happiness.

It is in the character of very few men to honor without envy a friend who has prospered.

The joy of learning and playing in school with friends is what the fondest memories are about.