“I have owed you this letter for a very long time — but my fingers have avoided the pencil as though it were an old and poisoned tool.”

“I made this [letter] very long, because I did not have the leisure to make it shorter.”

“I have rewritten — often several times — every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.”

“There is an old and very wise Native American saying: Every time you point a finger in scorn—there are three remaining fingers pointing right back at you.”

“Day 468—said the word ‘finger’ until it no longer made sense. Now, looking at my fingers I have no idea what they are, / except they’re wildly useful / for writing letters to my earliest ancestors”

“This is a letter of hate. It is for you my countrymen, I mean those men of my country who have defiled it. The men with manic fingers leading the sightless, feeble, betrayed body of my country to its death.”

“An old battleax of a woman said to Winston Churchill, "If you were my husband I would put poison in your tea." Churchill's response, "Ma'am if you were my wife I would drink it.”

“I wanted to be at the apex of my story…For a long time, it felt as though things were happening to me. I felt as though I had no agency.”

“Tana. In all my long life, though there were many times I prayed for it, no one has ever saved me. No one but you.”

“If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”