To grow up is to stop putting blame on parents - Maya Angelou

Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future and renders the present inaccessible…We may encounter many defeats but we must not be defeated.

If the heart of Africa remained elusive, my search for it had brought me closer to understanding myself and other human beings. The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned. It impels mighty ambitions and dangerous capers. We amass great fortunes at the cost of our souls, or risk our lives in drug dens from London’s Soho, to San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury. We shout in Baptist churches, wear yarmulkes and wigs and argue even the tiniest points in the Torah, or worship the sun and refuse to kill cows for the starving. Hoping that by doing these things, home will find us acceptable or failing that, that we will forget our awful yearning for it.

She used to say that her secret to life was that she “hoped for the best, was prepared for the worst, so anything in between didn’t come as a surprise.