In the time we have it is surely our duty to do all the good we can to all the people we can in all the ways we can.

Man is physically as well as metaphysically a thing of shreds and patches, borrowed unequally from good and bad ancestors, and a misfit from the start.

I think you have to be what you are. Don't try to be somebody else. You have to be yourself at all times.

The focus on just thinking about standardized test scores as being synonymous with achievement for teenagers is ridiculous, right? There are so many things that kids care about, where they excel, where they try hard, where they learn important life lessons, that are not picked up by test scores.

First, I'm trying to prove to myself that I'm a person. Then maybe I'll convince myself that I'm an actress.

The more I come to recognize my story's place in God's grander Story, my once-bewildered questions are turning to psalms of thanksgiving at the wonder that I have been included in what He is doing.

Artists should be free to create what we want. I believe there's a special value in work that is a reflection of oneself as opposed to interpretation. When I see a film or a TV show about black people not written by someone who's black, it's an interpretation of that life.

At twelve I looked like a girl of seventeen. My body was developed and shapely. I still wore the blue dress and the blouse the orphanage provided. They made me look like an overgrown lummox.

Worry less about solutions from the top or the idea that there is a solution, but try to do whatever you can and instill in each action the values that you want to result.

A great painting or symphony or play, doesn't diminish us, but enlarges us, and we, too, want to make our own cry of affirmation to the power of Creation behind the Universe.

God wants the world to see what God can do with his purchased possessions. So he prunes you.

I will write on the pages of history what I want them to say. I will be myself. I will speak my own name.