“Inspiration on its own was shallow; you had to back it up with hard work.”

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.

It’s easy to hear the voices of others and often very difficult to hear your own.

If you get up in the morning and think the future is going to be better, it is a bright day. Otherwise, it’s not.

Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do.

Everyone has a will to win but very few have the will to prepare to win.

Give me a child until he is 7 and I will show you the man.

Change will not come if we wait for some other person, or if we wait for some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.

When all life is seen as divine, everyone grows wings.

Dance until you shatter yourself.