“Success is not the absence of failure it's the persistence through failure. ”

“My parents were vegetarians. I'd show up at school, this giant black kid, with none of the cool clothes and a tofu sandwich and celery sticks.”

“People challenge my nerd cred all the time. I just show them the photo of me winning my middle-school science fair, wearing my Casio calculator watch and eyeglasses so big they look like they can s...”

“For a little while, my mom was a school teacher. And I went to the school that she taught.”

“The only concept or experience or core belief that I can attribute my other-ness to is that I just started out a weirdo and I stayed a weirdo. And it took me a long time to embrace my outsidership ...”

“I feel if you believe in equality, you have to believe in it for everybody. And that's the way I've always lived my life.”

“A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment.”

“I've always said that idleness dulls the spirit. We have to keep the brain busy, or at least the hands if we don't have a brain.”

“If your workplace was somehow transplanted into the jungle and everyone was forced to survive at a very primitive level, it's safe to say that eventually your boss would rape you.”

“The grain-fields went up the hillsides. Now as we went higher there was a wind blowing the grain.”

“The first step to having something in your life is to see yourself having it in your mind.”

“Before you begin a thing remind yourself that difficulties and delays quite impossible to foresee are ahead. ... You can only see one thing clearly and that is your goal. Form a mental vision of t...”