I am very much interested in getting parents to read to children, and trying to get people mentoring children. If I can do both I’ll be happy.

She is the only rose that doesn’t smell of plastic.

There was a baseball game on but it didn’t look real. It was guys in uniforms playing games on a deep green field. They were playing baseball as if baseball was important and as if all the world wasn’t in jail, watching them from a completely different world.

Sometimes I feel like I have walked into the middle of a movie. It is a strange movie with no plot and no beginning. The movie is in black and white, and grainy.

I was teased if I brought my books home. I would take a paper bag to the library and put the books in the bag and bring them home. Not that I was that concerned about them teasing me – because I would hit them in a heartbeat. But I felt a little ashamed, having books.

As a kid I didn’t see black cowboys on the screen. What that said to me was that there were things I couldn’t do or be because of my color. What we see others like us do gives us permission to expand our own horizons.

That’s what’s wrong with women. They want you to wait for them until they get ready and then they don’t even tell you how they feel.

I think it’s difficult for young people to acknowledge being smart, to knowledge being a reader. I see kids who are embarrassed to read books. They’re embarrassed to have people see them doing it.

Within the black community, roughly 60 percent of children are born to single moms. Moms don’t have the emotional wherewithal to deal with their children. Their English is atrocious. Their speaking is atrocious. The dropout rate is horrendous.

Yes, she is the fruit that will Sustain me and yes, she brings A rain that I know can chill But it is a rain so sweet and sings A song my soul insists That I follow, if I would exist As more than I have ever, ever been If my mother calls it evil, then I embrace the sin.