She smoothes the front of the dress, looking down at her hands, at her bitten fingernails, at her big feet in the pointy-toe shoes. This is a woman's dress, she thinks, a young woman's dress. It is...

Or maybe they weren't changing. Maybe they were just now becoming what they had always wanted to be.

I don't care if you're gay, black, Chinese, straight. That means nothing to me. It's all an illusion.

What is it about guys named Adam?

He was in a strange, badly lit room, wearing even stranger clothes, getting an earful from an unknown woman, in a language that he could and couldn't exactly place in a very disturbing way. These were...

What makes you think that people with other types of clothes are special? I can go to the shop, buy such clothes, and what? Now I am important?

"I believe that we don't choose our stories," she began, leaning forward. "Our stories choose us." She paused and took a sip of water. Her hand, I noticed was steady.. "And if we don't tell them, then...

Fashion is only different skins for different flavours of you.

I may be a famous writer but when white people clinch to their wallet and stare at me with scorn I need to ask my skin why.

Each of us has been designed for one of two immortal functions, as either a storyteller or as a cross-legged listener to tales of wonder, love, and daring. When we cease to tell or listen, then we no...

I'm not ugly but I'm not pretty either. Everything is in-between. I have eyes that aren't green or brown, but a muddle. I'm not thin but I'm not fat either. The only thing you could definitely say...

When she was little, she'd liked to pretend that stars were really lights anchoring distant islands, as if she wasn't looking up but only out across a dark sea. She knew the truth now but still found...

I smiled at him. America, I said quietly, just like that. What is it? The sweepings of every country including our own. Isn't that true? That's a fact.

When they had hurried to the train station with their violin cases, they had drawn almost as many stares as they would on any normal day when their hair was to their knees and sheeting behind them...

I love what Jacksonville taught me and where it led me. The good, the bad and the indifferent all helped shape me. I may not live there anymore but it lives inside me. It is and will always be my...

But years and miles away from home could never attenuate the city's hold on my identity, and the more I explored places and people far from Hampton, the more my status as one of its daughters came to...

I think life becomes a fabric of choices, interwoven, all related... I split my life into these two things, thief and lady

There's the trick: to find the way - whether forwards or back - to what we long to be.

So often I'm like, No, thanks, to all of that stuff, just give me the room to exist both in the shit and stars . . . We have to fight to be understood as being distinct and incongruent. But I think it...

For a majority of women it remains difficult to reconcile increasingly burdensome maternal responsibilities with personal fulfillment.

So who do I want to be tomorrow?

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

True, beneath the human façade, I was an interloper, an alien whose ship had crashed beyond hope of repair in the backwoods of Southern Appalachia - but at least I'd learned to walk and talk enough...

So I found myself telling my own stories. It was strange: as I did it I realised how much we get shaped by our stories. It's like the stories of our lives make us the people we are. If someone had no...

One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland - and no other.

I believe it went like this - and stop me if I'm wrong, Mousey: 'Listen, we may not be our own continent and everything, but we have a big country over in America too.'

It is rooted deep in your bones

What are any of our lives but the shapes we force them into. Memory doesn't come to us of its own; we go after it, pull it into sunlight and make of it what we need, what we're driven towards, what we...

Maybe that's who you are, what you remember.

In the space of solitude, a writer attempts to remember how they became whom they are but nobody's memory is up to this demanding task. No matter how much a person harrows the fertile lanes of memory,...