“But I hope I will never have a life that is not surrounded by books, by books that are bound in paper and cloth and glue, such perishable things for ideas that have lasted thousands of years, or ju...”

“Every life deserves a certain amount of dignity, no matter how poor or damaged the shell that carries it.”

“In water so fine, a few minutes of bad memory all but disappear downstream, washed away by ten thousand belly busters, a million cannonballs. Paradise was never heaven-high when I was a boy but wai...”

“I know I grew up in the time when a young man in a baggy suit and slicked-down hair stood spraddle-legged in the crossroads of history and talked hot and mean about the colored, giving my poor and ...”

“We are good at stories. We hoard them, like an old woman in a room full of boxes, but now and then we pull out our best, and spread them out. We talk of the bad years when the cotton didn't open, a...”

“This is home and home is not something you remember, it is something you see every day and every moment.”

“[W]hen it's slow, they send you home, and when it's busy, they expect you to stay late. They also expect you to be able to come in to cover someone's shift if a co-worker gets sick at the last minu...”

“Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to p...”

“A man may beg, but a woman has to sell.”

“The worlds most successful people didnt wait for someone else to pick them, but instead, they picked themselves.”

“Play around. Dive into absurdity and write. Take chances. You will succeed if you are fearless of failure.”

“Want something else more than success. Success is a lovely thing, but your desire to say something, your worth, and your identity shouldnt rely on it, because its not guaranteed and its not permane...”