“Life was teaching me that progress and change happen slowly. Not in two years, four years, or even a lifetime. We were planting seeds of change, the fruit of which we might never see. We had to be patient.”

It hurts to live after someone has died. It just does.

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.

Unfortunately, unless we’re focused on building up our courage, which gives us our self-confidence and all that we need to make quantum change in our lives, the voice of fear will always take the lead inside our minds.

We should be treating, I think, the whole issue of climate change and global warming with a far greater degree of priority than I think is happening now.

Change your story, change your life. Basically, that’s what it is.

You can’t change someone’s behaviour, all you can do is remind them, and hope that Allah will change their heart.

A year ago everything started to change. I didn’t think I could come out on the other side. The view is fine. I’m fine. Better now.

If you have a strong mind and plant in it a firm resolve, you can change your destiny.

If you know what changes a heart, you know what changes the world.

Everything changes, even stone.