“You can't rewind war. It spools on, and on, and on, looping and jumping, distorted and cracked with age, and the stories contract until only the nuggets of hatred remain and no one can even remembe...”

“She treated Vanessa and me as if we were visiting budgerigars that needed to be fed and then put somewhere dark for the night.”

“What is important is the story. Because when we are all dust and teeth and kicked-up bits of skin - when we're dancing with our own skeletons - our words might be all that's left of us.”

“You learn not to mourn every little thing out here, or youd never, ever stop grieving.”

“It was a land of almost breathtaking beauty or of savage poverty; a land of screaming ghosts or of sun-flung possibilities; a land of inviting warmth or of desperate drought. How you see a country ...”

“The two of us lurching on an unlikely journey up a lonely road in the dark, thick beginning of a Mozambique night. As our pickup churned over rocks and through thick sand, the engine drowned out th...”

“No body wishes more than I do to see such proofs as you exhibit, that nature has given to our black brethren, talents equal to those of the other colors of men, and that the appearance of a want of...”

“Racial prejudice has always been a difficult topic for me. On several occasions I've withdrawn from conversations that devolved into white bashing. I can never make a general negative statements ba...”

“My story has more than a "great white hope" plot. I loved and respected Tom because he was a servant of God who happened to be white, just as I feel I am a servant of God who happens to be black an...”

“A DEFINITION NOT FOUND IN THE DICTIONARY Not leaving: an act of trust and love,often deciphered by children”

“The ideal-worker standard and norm of work devotion push mothers to the margins of economic life. And a society that marginalizes its mothers impoverishes its children. That is why the paradigmatic...”

“When God Created Mothers"When the Good Lord was creating mothers, He was into His sixth day of "overtime" when the angel appeared and said. "You're doing a lot of fiddling around on this one." And ...”

“Miss Parkinson lived alone in a big bay-windowed house of Edwardian brick with a vast garden of decaying fruit trees and untidy hedges of gigantic size. She was great at making elderberry wine and ...”

“The child was slender as fleeting hope.”

“They passed, leaving a trail of foxfire shuffled up out of the wet leaves like stars plowed in a ship's wake.”