GLORIA NAYLOR

Lord keep her safe since you can't keep her sane.

Self-consciousness is really a form of egotism.

I wrote what I felt I had to write, and I'm willing to put my own sanity and my reputation behind it.

Old as she was, she still missed her daddy sometimes.

Life is accepting what is and working from that.

One should be able to return to the first sentence of a novel and find the resonances of the entire work.

I don't believe that life is supposed to make you feel good, or make you feel miserable either. Life is just supposed to make you feel.

Not only is your story worth telling, but it can be told in words so painstakingly eloquent that it becomes a song.

The intelligence community, for the most part, has no accountability at all; to the Congress, to us the American people, and so they feel that they above the law.

Spoiled. That's all it's about - can't live without this, can't live without that. You can live without anything you weren't born with, and you can make it through on even half of that.

You can't teach talent. You can't put in what God left out - but you can teach confidence.

I realize at one point, that I was being followed, and then I began to see the surveillance that was going past the road on my house. And so, these cars began to surveil me. People began to follow me around, and it did, it was very disrupting to think that your privacy was being violated, and for no reason that I could come up with.

There's something hypocritical about a city that keeps half of its population underground half of the time; you can start believing that there's much more space than there really is-to live, to work.

The right woman is the one you can live with, not the one in your head.

Contempt mates well with pity.

Time's passage through the memory is like molten glass that can be opaque or crystalize at any given moment at will: a thousand days are melted into one conversation, one glance, one hurt, and one hurt can be shattered and sprinkled over a thousand days. It is silent and elusive, refusing to be damned and dripped out day by day; it swirls through the mind while an entire lifetime can ride like foam on the deceptive, transparent waves and get sprayed onto the conciousness at ragged, unexpected intervals.

The last time you're doing something - knowing you're doing it for the last - makes it even more alive than the first.

a star dies in heaven every time you snatch away someone's dream.

A loud voice is not always angry; a soft voice not always to be dismissed; and a well-placed silence can be the indisputable last word.

Sometimes being a friend means mastering the art of timing. There is a time for silence. A time to let go... And a time to prepare to pick up the pieces when it's all over.

That's one of the privileges of old age - you can give plenty of advice 'cause most folks think that's all you got left anyway.

It's as if I've arrived in a place where it's all spirit and no body -- an overwhelming sense of calm . . . I actually began to feel blessed.

Why do I write? The truth, the unvarnished truth, is that I haven't a clue.

We get so caught up in what a man isn't. It's what he is that counts.

She could walk through a lightning storm without being touched; grab a bolt of lightning in the palm of her hand; use the heat of lightning to start the kindling going under her medicine pot. She turned the moon into salve, the stars into swaddling cloth, and healed the wounds of every creature walking up on two or down on four.