In order to write a memoir, I’ve sat still inside the swirling vortex of my own complicated history like a piece of old driftwood, battered by the sea. I’ve waited—sometimes patiently, sometimes in despair—for the...

My meal arrived. It was a bowl of tepid, green curried water with two spinach leaves floating in it. The waiter called it ‘vegetable soup’. I called it inedible slop.

In those days, there was no money to buy books.

I guess this means we’re uck-fayed, don’t it Mikee?

I go to all the appointments. All the meetings. I sit with the team of inclusion teachers, occupational therapists, doctors, social workers, remedial teachers, and the cab driver that gets him from appointment to appointment,...

I didn’t make choices based on what I liked or didn’t like. I simply accepted what they chose for me. My role had always been to react and adapt to what was decided by other...

What to wear on a Minnesota farm? The older farmers I know wear brown polyester jumpsuits, like factory workers. The younger ones wear jeans, but the forecast was for ninety-five degrees with heavy humidity. The...

This, I suspect, is the territory that lies just ahead and around the curve of today. A place where loss grows more familiar, where joy is harmonized by sorrow, where endings outnumber beginnings, and where...

If you don’t like it, Eat me.

Our destiny is aligned with our heart’s innermost longing, a longing embedded within our soul before birth. This longing is a unique pattern or configuration reminiscent of the constellations in the night sky. When we...

The stars were withdrawn, small, giving no light, unlike other nights when they seemed to hang large from the sky ready to be reached for and taken into our hands.

To me he seemed one of those persons destined to failure of whom you wonder what purpose it can ever serve that they should have ben born.

Just because you can, doesn’t necessarily mean that you should!

This is the only advice I offer you. Pick the small thing, and carry it on. Let it change your life.

How many pages will it take to tell your story?

Fact: upon locking yourself our of your apartment you will immediately need to use the bathroom. Fact: and then you will stand in place and watch your door. You will just stare. As though rebuffed...

The writer’s business is to find the shape in unruly life and to serve her story.

Sometimes you have to travel back in time, skirting the obstacles, in order to love someone.

God doesn’t want your careful virtue, He wants your reckless generosity.

I felt so happy I could barely stay in my skin

Every time when you think,Think about every first 20 seconds of your best Moments in your life time.

I try to walk around without being noticed but I can’t help attracting attention with my pink Mohawk, black clothing and steel toes, and often I’m with Holly and we’re both tall and arrogant.

There’s this parallel, perhaps less conscious desire, which is to numb myself to the world. To deal with the world tomorrow. Living is difficult. Dying is difficult.

Honor, Courage, and Commitment.

I get absolutely shitfaced. I am shitfaced and hyper and ten years old. I am having the time of my life.

They departed in the form of white smoke, rose easily upward, waved their hands in parting, and viewed with pity all those who remained behind. Then they danced gaily in celebration of their new freedom,...

The whole world is like an opened candy jar, and we’re plunging in for the best treats

Your heartbeat is so different from his,” I whisper it; he has to ask me to repeat myself. I explain, “My father…his heartbeat was so fast. I could feel it, racing…it was like his heartbeat...

Who have you helped today”?

I think this is what we all want to hear: that we are not alone in hitting the bottom, and that it is possible to come out of that place courageous, beautiful, and strong.

The idea of practicing love is deeply appealing to me, because built right in is an acceptance of imperfection. There is an acknowledgment to myself that I am going to mess this up, an understanding...

You wanted to live inside the lines where the ordinariness of everything would protect you from the dragons that lay at the edge of the map ready to blow fire in your face if you...

Answering the question ‘How would you like to smell?’ by saying ‘I’d rather I didn’t’ is also no longer acceptable. It’s not playing the game. Men are expected to put some cash into the cosmetic...

It was one of those striking moments in life where you find familiarity in the inexplicable.

Do your parents know you’re here?’ asked the lady at social Services. ‘No,’ I said, ‘but I want to know about children’s homes.’ I had to stand on my toes to see over the reception...

Is there anything courageous or brave about making the only possible choice that will save your life? When you’re drowning, you grab any hand that’s offered. To me, bravery is a spontaneous decision to save...

Memory for most is a kind of afterlife; for my mother, it is another form of life.

I don’t need to write a memoir of my life. All you need to do is read one of my books. I’m there.

Lesson learned: If you’re already resorting to writing shitty poetry (not the lovey-dovey kind) to get your guys attention within one month of meeting him, he is not the one.

I read somewhere that a man should tell the story of his life at the age of forty, and this deadline is fast approaching as I write these lines, only a few short weeks remain...

Oh my!! How you’ve grown. Soon you’ll be catching the Lord’s balls.

I discovered that when one follows the artist’s eye one sees unexpected treasures in so many seemingly ordinary scenes.

In late 1949, at two and a half years old, I arrived in Jamaica for the first time. I had crossed the Atlantic by air from England. My Jamaican father was studying in London, my...

If you can see it, you can achieve it. God helps those who helps themselves. Power is in the act of humility.

Mistakes? That’s why they put erasers on pencils.

The Element of Surprise is their in every day,It’s when you wake up.

Success is not due to spontaneous combustion. You have to set yourself on fire.

It has long been my motto that if you cannot get your act together… then the very least you can do is try to make your act entertaining.

I am still not good enough. I am still not whole enough. I am still not pure enough. I am still weakness and sharp edges and broken, but He is good and pure and whole,...

Life is worth living and no matter what it throws at you it is important to keep your eyes on the prize of the happiness that will come. Even when the Death Railway reduced us...