“Listen, Harriet. I do unterstand. I know you don't want either to give or to take ... You don't want ever again to have to depend for happiness on another person.""That's true. That's the truest th...”

“Facts are like cows. If you look them in the face long enough, they generally run away.”

“See that the mind is honest, first; the rest may follow or not as God wills. [That] the fundamental treason to the mind ... is the one fundamental treason which the scholar's mind must not allow is...”

“Oh, well, faint heart never won so much as a scrap of paper”

“Here be dragons to be slain, here be rich rewards to gain;If we perish in the seeking, why, how small a thing is death!”

“The planet's tyrant, dotard Death, had held his gray mirror before them for a moment and shown them the image of things to come.”

“Become 'tested' in such a way that not a single word in this world can shake you up.”

“Every single diet I ever fell off of was because of potatoes and gravy of some sort.”

“When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.”

“Some negroes lie, some are immoral, some negro men are not be trusted around women - black and white. But this is a truth that applies to the human race and to no particular race of men.”

“The only honest way to approach the question of whiteness and blackness is to start by accepting that these are arbitrary categories that were invented in the 17th and 18th century in order to just...”

“I never asked Tolstoy to write for me, a little colored girl in Lorain, Ohio. I never asked [James] Joyce not to mention Catholicism or the world of Dublin. Never. And I don't know why I should be ...”

“Sometimes when I'm writing, I wonder if the words have a mind of their own, and if they're really just using me as a puppet to manifest themselves.”

“If we occupy our minds with self-loathing or negative thoughts, then maybe we dont have enough to do.”

“The more refined and subtle our minds, the more vulnerable they are.”