“And I realized that this is what it's like to be an adult, learning to pick from a lot of bad choices and do the best you can with that dreadful compromise. Learning to smile, to put your best foot...”

“She didn't say anything, just a long, quiet "shhhh," as if she had learned that the troubles of the world could be absorbed and deafened by slow, steady wistfulness, and I suddenly understood that ...”

“Human nature defeats me sometimes, how greed and spite can lurk so divisively around the utmost courage and sacrifice.”

“If we don't think about our death until we die, how can we decide how we want to live?”

“I took a deep breath of the syrupy sweetness of summer, suffused with bees and birds, and I thought to myself how beautiful this world can be. How lucky we are to be here, to be part of it, for how...”

“Then I looked out onto the horizon myself and realized that loss is the same wherever you go: overwhelming, inexorable, deafening. How resilient human beings are that we can learn slowly to carry o...”

“No black woman writer in this culture can write "too much". Indeed, no woman writer can write "too much"...No woman has ever written enough.”

“When you reduce a woman to writing, she makes you think of a thousand other women”

“I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”