“Look how I’m managing, I wanted to say in those moments, to my audience of no one. Does everyone see that I’m pulling this off?”

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.

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

We should not fret for what is past, nor should we be anxious about the future; men of discernment deal only with the present moment.

Fashion is everything. Art, music, furniture design, graphic design, hair, makeup, architecture, the way cars look – all those things go together to make a moment in time, and that’s what excites me.

From the moment you put a piece of bread in your mouth you are part of the world. Who grew the wheat? Who made the bread? Where did it come from? You are in relationship with all who brought it to the table. We are least separate and most in common when we eat and drink.

Stop a moment, cease your work, and look around you.

I’ve defined love in so many ways before this moment, but this is by far my favorite.

Don’t ever say you are sorry for “being caught in the moment”. Because, at that moment, that is EXACTLY where you wanted to be.

Don’t judge the moment.

When toys are not given to the child, they cry for a moment, but if a child is not given the knowledge of behavior, he then cries for his whole life.