“There have been times I have thought some dreams should never be dreamt, but I would hate a world where that was true.”

“because white men can't police their imagination black men are dying”

“There is only one place to write and that is alone at a typewriter. The writer who has to go into the streets is a writer who does not know the streets. . . when you leave your typewriter you leave your machine gun and the rats come pouring through.”

“The business of being happy requires making a conscious choice. People think being happy will just happen to them someday, if only they do this or that right. But it doesn't - you have to choose it. You choose happiness, you don't wait for it to choose you.”

“We meet the people we’re supposed to when the time is just right.”

“That’s what winter is: an exercise in remembering how to still yourself then how to come pliantly back to life again.”

“Some people—and I am one of them—hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm. Doom should not jam. The avalanche stopping in its tracks a few feet above the cowering village behaves not only unnaturally but unethically.”

“Soft hearts make the universe worth living in.”