“Haitians weren't screwed-up, but everything political, intellectual, and material around them is.”

Berkman Center (May 15, 2008) http://news.cnet.com/8301-13953_3-9945028-80.html

Source: The Year of Secret Assignments

Source: White Oleander

Source: How to Talk to a Widower

About running for governor of Alabama, on Campbell Brown, CNN, October 27, 2008 http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/10/27/brown.barkley/index.html.

quoted in Londhe, S. (2008). A tribute to Hinduism: Thoughts and wisdom spanning continents and time about India and her culture. New Delhi: Pragun Publication.

Source: Message in a Bottle

Source: threatening to obstruct the Senate if the Republicans used the nuclear option. Quoted in The Washington Post, December 13, 2004, GOP May Target Use of Filibuster http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A59877-2004Dec12.html

Source: Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading (2005), Chapter 2 (p. 70)
Context: Family and cultural origins are crucial to self-definition, but they’re not the end of the story. I certainly don’t think that we readers only or even chiefly enjoy or understand books whose main characters mirror us. In fact, the opportunity to become who we are decidedly not—whether it’s Amis’s Dixon or Philip Roth’s Portnoy or Ellison’s Invisible Man or Kafka’s beetle—is one of the greatest gifts reading offers. Women readers get to serve on that floating boy’s club, the Pequod; male readers get to step into Elizabeth Bennet’s shoes and teach Mr. Darcy the dance of humility; readers of either gender who are not African American get to crawl toward freedom alongside Toni Morrison’s Sethe. One of the most magical and liberating things about literature is that it can transport us readers into worlds totally unlike our own.