43 Quotes by Susan Burton

Most people had a history in this region, but not my parents, and my early, defining relationship to my environment was a feeling of being not from here, even though I had never lived in any other place.

It showed me one thing that being an adult meant. You were no longer limited to observing the world: Now you can join in. Instead of just being a fan of things you loved, you could get inside them. You could make them yourself. I was thrilled to know this. I was twenty-one years old and I was going to move to New York, get a job at a magazine, and become a writer.

...it allowed me to engage with my experience intellectually instead of practically, to analyze it instead of trying to fix it. And it demonstrated how another woman, in another time, had struggled with a version of my problem and tried to make sense of her story in her own language.

Insulin is a crisis medication.

There are so many bright people who just need an opportunity to help others and pay it forward.

I knew I wasn't born to be caged and chained up.

I can remember, as a child, the happy days of us all piling into the car and going to the drive-in. And that was a weekly routine for my father. He was a proud black man, and that all sort of vanished as America began to export jobs.

I went to pick my son up from school and walked him back and was in the house preparing dinner, and he came in the house and gave me this flower of chrysanthemum that was full of ants. And he went back out to play and ran out into the street and got hit by a car. The car happened to be driven by a LAPD detective.

Morning meditation is important to start every day on a positive note.