Quotes on Us

Writers, especially those of us with roots in other countries, are rarely left to ourselves. We are asked to declare our allegiances, or they are determined for us.

There's so much boldness in living life this way, and we did it all, and no one can take it away from us.

So many of us don't know what we want; we just know we don't want what we have. We spend 99% of the time talking about how bad it is, but only 1% of the time talking about how we can do something about it.

In my time since moving to the United States, I've found that there is a dearth of great writing for black people. There are stories that depict us in a way that isn't cliched or niche, and that a white person, a Chinese person, an Indian person can watch and relate to. Those are the stories I want to be a part of telling.

There are a lot of challenges I undeniably have faced as a black person both in the U.K. and in the U.S. that contrived to make me feel lesser than what I am.

U.S. adversaries exploit power gaps. It's easier for Russia to invade Ukraine with irregular forces out of uniform, the so-called 'little green men,' than to send a conventional army that would challenge NATO.

We're kind of wishing some parents would come back. And of course we're uneasy about the fact that we wish they'd come back - I mean, what's wrong with us?

All of us are born for a reason, but all of us don't discover why. Success in life has nothing to do with what you gain in life or accomplish for yourself. It's what you do for others.

The truth is, bad things don't affect us as profoundly as we expect them to. That's true of good things, too. We adapt very quickly to either.

Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us.

When we reach reflexively for something to dull an ache inside of us, in that very moment of reaching, we are hiding from our pain. We're storing it away. Tamping it down.

I wish that television would stop selling our hatred of ourselves, and start seducing us with our love of ourselves.

There's too much judgment out there. Really what we need to be doing is just all of us finding our own paths towards living the best lives we can live as clearly and boldly in accordance with our own personal values. And that's what I'm trying to do.

I think we need stories, and we need to tell the stories over and over and over not only to remind us, but to be able to have that clarity of experience that changes us, so that we know who we are now because of who we have been at some other time.

When we say that black lives matter, it's not because others don't: it's simply because we must affirm that we are worthy of existing without fear, when so many things tell us we are not.

In reality, every single negotiation involves another commodity that's far more important to us, which is time - minutes, hours, our investment in time. So even if you're talking about dollars, the commodity of time is always there because there has to be a discussion about how the commodity of dollars is moved.

The Earth does not belong to us: we belong to the Earth.

May we have communion with God in the secret of our hearts, and find Him to be to us as a little sanctuary.

More and more, as civilization develops, we find the primitive to be essential to us. We root into the primitive as a tree roots into the earth. If we cut off the roots, we lose the sap without which we can't progress or even survive. I don't believe our civilization can continue very long out of contact with the primitive.

Sometimes it takes a wake-up call, doesn't it, to alert us to the fact that we're hurrying through our lives instead of actually living them; that we're living the fast life instead of the good life. And I think, for many people, that wake-up call takes the form of an illness.

I have often said that domestic violence is characterised by silence: of the abused, of the abuser and of those who don't know how to intervene. But the media have the ability to break this corrosive silence: bringing us the voices of victims; shattering the taboo; and raising awareness of what we can all do to stop this heinous crime.