Born on July 11 — Quotes

Without a single grandparent or parent or uncle or aunt at her side, the baby’s birth, like most everything else in America, feels somehow haphazard, only half true. As she strokes and suckles and studies her son, she can’t help but pity him. She has never known of a person entering the world so alone, so deprived.

Discover your difference — the asynchrony with which you have been blessed or cursed — and make the most of it.

They don't understand why I want to take such a risk. These reactions don't surprise me. A transformation, especially one that is deliberately sought, is often perceived as something disloyal, threatening.

If you are not prepared to resign or be fired for what you believe in, then you are not a worker, let alone a professional. You are a slave.

Rocking the vote may mean going to the booths and writing in our Candidate, because he doesn't seem to be on the ballot. (p. 335)

The more I get to know Jesus, the more trouble he seems to get me into

Like pregnancy, being a foreigner, Ashima believes, is something that elicits the same curiosity of from strangers, the same combination of pity and respect.

Change is not the solution. Continuity is the way to go.

Brandi and and I want to say LaToya Jackson, when I heard all the yelling, I'm like what is Latoya Jackson doing yelling at Brandi for being racist

Solitude: it's become my trade. As it requires a certain discipline, it's a condition I try to perfect. And yet it plagues me, it weighs on me in spite of my knowing it so well.

With government driving up the cost of labor, it's driving down the number of jobs. You're going to see automation not just in airports and grocery stores, but in restaurants. This is the problem with Bernie Sanders, and Hillary Clinton, and progressives who push very hard to raise the minimum wage. Does it really help if Sally makes $3 more an hour if Suzie has no job? If you're making labor more expensive, and automation less expensive — this is not rocket science. They're always polite, they always upsell, they never take a vacation, they never show up late, there's never a slip-and-fall, or an age, sex, or race discrimination case.

Well-behaved women seldom make history.

Surely it is a magical thing for a handful of words, artfully arranged, to stop time. To conjure place, a person, a situation, in all its specificity and dimensions. To affect us and alter us, as profoundly as real people and things do.

A pioneer is not someone who makes her own soap. She is one who takes up her burdens and walks toward the future.

If I want to understand what moves me, what confuses me, what pains me — everything that makes me react, in short — I have to put it into words.