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" I like to speak on matters which matter to human beings, and almost everything matters to human beings. "

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" Every December, I host a tree-trimming party. I serve chili with cornbread and lots of good wine. It's a wonderful party, and it shows how much adults like to play. "

" Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends. "

" We may encounter many defeats but we must not be defeated. "

" Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you can't practice any other virtue consistently. You can practice any virtue erratically, but nothing consistently without courage. "

" Encouragement to all women is - let us try to offer help before we have to offer therapy. That is to say, let's see if we can't prevent being ill by trying to offer a love of prevention before illness. "

" In all my work, I try to say - 'You may be given a load of sour lemons, why not try to make a dozen lemon meringue pies?' "

" All information belongs to everybody all the time. It should be available. It should be accessible to the child, to the woman, to the man, to the old person, to the semiliterate, to the presidents of universities, to everyone. It should be open. "

" Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him. "

" I'm always disappointed when people don't live up to their potential. I know that a number of people look down on themselves and consequently on everybody who looks like them. But that, too, can change. "

" I do like to have guns around. I don't like to carry them. But I like - if somebody is going to come into my house and I have not put out the welcome mat, I want to stop them. "

" I've still not written as well as I want to. I want to write so that the reader in Des Moines, Iowa, in Kowloon, China, in Cape Town, South Africa, can say, 'You know, that's the truth. I wasn't there, and I wasn't a six-foot black girl, but that's the truth.' "

" I want to write so well that a person is 30 or 40 pages in a book of mine... before she realizes she's reading. "

" Most people don't grow up. It's too damn difficult. What happens is most people get older. That's the truth of it. They honor their credit cards, they find parking spaces, they marry, they have the nerve to have children, but they don't grow up. "

" I'm just someone who likes cooking and for whom sharing food is a form of expression. "

" Autobiography is awfully seductive; it's wonderful. Once I got into it, I realized I was following a tradition established by Frederick Douglass - the slave narrative - speaking in the first-person singular, talking about the first-person plural, always saying 'I,' meaning 'we.' "

" In so many ways, segregation shaped me, and education liberated me. "

" When I write, I tend to twist my hair. Something for my small mind to do, I guess. "

" The first decade of the twentieth century was not a great time to be born black and poor and female in St. Louis, Missouri, but Vivian Baxter was born black and poor, to black and poor parents. Later she would grow up and be called beautiful. As a grown woman she would be known as the butter-colored lady with the blowback hair. "

" If you're a human being, you can attempt to do what other human beings have done. We don't understand talent any more than we understand electricity. "

" If you were the President of the United States or the Queen of England - you couldn't have a person who would be more protective than my mother was for me. Which meant really that I could dare to do all sorts of things. "

" When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time. "

" I was born in St. Louis but lived there just for a few minutes in my life. "

" At 50, I began to know who I was. It was like waking up to myself. "

" I know for sure that loves saves me and that it is here to save us all. "

" All great achievements require time. "

" To take a few nouns, and a few pronouns, and adverbs and adjectives, and put them together, ball them up, and throw them against the wall to make them bounce. That's what Norman Mailer did. That's what James Baldwin did, and Joan Didion did, and that's what I do - that's what I mean to do. "

" It is time for parents to teach young people early on that in diversity there is beauty and there is strength. "

" Don't get older just to get wiser. If you get older, you will be wiser, I believe that - if you dare. But get older because it's fun! "

" When the human race neglects its weaker members, when the family neglects its weakest one - it's the first blow in a suicidal movement. I see the neglect in cities around the country, in poor white children in West Virginia and Virginia and Kentucky - in the big cities, too, for that matter. "

" I always knew from that moment, from the time I found myself at home in that little segregated library in the South, all the way up until I walked up the steps of the New York City library, I always felt, in any town, if I can get to a library, I'll be OK. It really helped me as a child, and that never left me. "