To leave the comforts of home, the mother world, one must have some place to go. Admittedly, the rites of passage of traditional cultures were to initiate the youth into a simpler society, a more...

She had a sense of longing and loss that she had never had before. It was as if her family history had been erased and they'd been left unmemorable. She imagined that Rachel's family must have similar...

In the words he's free, on the page he can be anything. A hero.

But Tik Tok believes everything's circular, including men and women. He says nature seems to go around and around, and that we all have bits of everything.

I kept waiting for the part where I'd finally know who I was - some flashing, neon moment of relief, but it never came.

It came to my house. It sat on my shoulders. Your shadow is yours. I told it so. I said it was yours. I have carried it with me too long. I give it back.

And my experience in the music scene had shown me that there were places for places in the world where misfits were welcome.

the walking stick, like a burqa, conferred protective status...

I will keep writing about these intersections as a writer and a teacher, as a black woman, as a bad feminist, until I no longer feel like what I want is impossible. I no longer want to believe that...

Understand me. I'm not like an ordinary world. I have my madness, I live in another dimension and I do not have time for things that have no soul.

So, yes, I should have just surrendered, took the entitled heir her little pouch of privileges, made my calls to the power brokers, did my duty. I thought about that moment later on. Maybe I got...

I don't know who my grandfather was

That, I decided, was what it meant to be a slave: your past didn't matter, in the present you were invisible and you had no claim on the future.

When history disappears, you disappear.

Our privileges are the things not within our own control that push us forward and move us ahead from that starting line. Acknowledging them does not mean you are admitting to doing something to...

In here I'm the guy who can get things for you... outside all you need is the Yellow Pages. I don't think I could make it.

So many people focus on who they will be that they never get around to figuring out who they are.

Denying what you are didn't keep people from knowing what you are. And flaunting it isn't what saved you. Ykka takes a deep breath. The muscles in her jaw flex, relax. And that would be why I asked...

"You're like, both like, Alexander the Great.' 'We can't both be Alexander.' 'Well sometimes I think you're two sides of the same coin, and I'm the metal in between.'"

Life consists of many different stories. A person has not just one but countless life stories that weave in between each other and together create exactly that specific life and that specific human...

We can't help the way we're born. We can't help what we are, only what life we choose to make for ourselves.

It is in our relations with other people that we gain a sense of ourselves; it's that, pretty much, that makes relations with other people unbearable.

What would you say to yourself if you could actually meet a younger you?

When you open to me and I open to you, when we immerse you into me and I into you, when we lose you in me and I in you, Only then am I me and you are you.

You are not made in 'your image'. You are, in fact, made in 'God's image'. Therefore, which one are you looking for when you look in the mirror?

If God were to make a million lovely flowers in your image and plant them in a garden with you among them, I would still know you by your scent and by the feel of your petals and by the crazy way you...

To be alone is to be different, to be different is to be alone.

"I'm Razo, a member of Bayern's Own," he said, stopping himself from adding "Loafing is just a hobby of mine." "Bayern's Own? But you're a child." Razo looked up to the sky. "I'm not a child, I'm just...

What's in a name, anyway? That which we call a nose by any other name would still smell.

Basically, everyone thinks -- knows -- how sweet I am. Emma, you threw my sister through hurricane-proof glass.