“Whirling silence settled around Jessica. Every fiber of her body accepted the fact that something profound had happened to it. She felt that she was a conscious mote, smaller than any subatomic particle, yet capable of motion and of sensing her surroundings. Like an abrupt revelation—the curtains whipped away—she realized she had become aware of a psychokinesthetic extension of herself. She was the mote, yet not the mote.”

“We need to realize that poverty doesn't only consist of being hungry for bread, but rather it is a tremendous hunger for human dignity. We need to love and to be someone for someone else”

“May your choices reflect your hopes, not your fears.”

“If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?”

“Interwoven as is the love of liberty with every ligament of your hearts, no recommendation of mine is necessary to fortify or confirm the attachment.”

“Failing is an event, not a person. Yesterday ended last night.”

“Friends, the church is to be centered on the Lord Jesus Christ.”

“If our minds and hearts are not filled with God’s truth, something else will take His place: cynicism, occultism, false religions and philosophies, drugs—the list is endless.”

“Through the written Word we discover the Living Word—Jesus Christ.”

“But whenever I tried to pin down this idea of self-esteem, the specific qualities we hoped to inculcate, the specific means by which we might feel good about ourselves, the conversation always seemed to follow a path of infinite regress. Did you dislike yourself because of your color or because you couldn’t read and couldn’t get a job? Or perhaps it was because you were unloved as a child—only, were you unloved because you were too dark? Or too light? Or because your mother shot heroin into her veins … and why did she do that anyway? Was the sense of emptiness you felt a consequence of kinky hair or the fact that your apartment had no heat and no decent furniture? Or was it because deep down you imagined a godless universe? Maybe one couldn’t avoid such questions on the road to personal salvation. What I doubted was that all the talk about self-esteem could serve as the centerpiece of an effective black politics. It demanded too much honest self-reckoning from people; without such honesty, it easily degenerated into vague exhortation. Perhaps with more self-esteem fewer blacks would be poor, I thought to myself, but I had no doubt that poverty did nothing for our self-esteem. Better to concentrate on the things we might all agree on. Give that black man some tangible skills and a job. Teach that black child reading and arithmetic in a safe, well-funded school. With the basics taken care of, each of us could search for our own sense of self-worth.”

“The most precious gift that marriage gave me was the constant impact of something very close and intimate, yet all the time unmistakably other, resistant - in a word, real.”

“We must come to see that the end we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience.”

“The 1930s, Kennedy said, 'taught us a clear lesson; aggressive conduct, if allowed to go unchecked and unchallenged, ultimately leads to war.”

“How could America send men into space and still keep its black citizens in bondage?”

“If the first thing you do when you wake up in the morning is eat a live frog, then nothing worse can happen for the rest of the day!" Brian Tracy says that your "frog" should be the most difficult item on your things-to-do list, the one you're most likely to procrastinate on; because, if you eat that first, it'll give you energy and momentum for the rest of the day. But, if you don't...if you let him sit there on the plate and stare at you while you do a hundred unimportant things, it can drain your energy and you won't even know it.”