She was our mother and belonged to us. She was never mentioned to anyone because we simply didn't have enough of her to share.

The Black child must learn early to allow laughter to fill his mouth or the million small cruelties he encounters will congeal and clog his throat.

There is nothing more appalling than a constantly morose child.

I was going to look like one of the sweet little white girls who were everybody's dream of what was right with the world.

Laughter so easily turns to hysteria for imaginative children.

Stand up straight and realize who you are, that you tower over your circumstances. You are a child of God. Stand up straight.

My mother is so full of joy and life. I am her child. And that is better than being the child of anyone else in the world.

The most difficult thing in the world, it seems to me, is to realize that I am a child of God; to keep that in my mind all the time.

I believed that there was a God because I was told it by my grandmother and later by other adults. But when I found that I knew not only that there was God but that I was a child of God, when I understood that, when I comprehended that, more than that, when I internalized that, ingested that, I became courageous.