“To get the full value of joy you must have someone to divide it with.”

“The truth is life is full of joy and full of great sorrow, but you can't have one without the other.”

“Full nakedness! All joys are due to thee,
As souls unbodied, bodies unclothed must be,
To taste whole joys.”

“Sometimes the only thing to do is to take the thing that you must have. Even if someone gets hurt.”

“There is nothing in your budget for joy. No books, no flowers, no music, not even a cold beer. And there is nothing in your budget to give away to someone else. We don’t help people who don’t have better values than you do.”

“I wanted to know what happened when two people felt it. Would it divide the hurt in two, make it lighter to bear, the way feeling someone's joy seemed to double it?”

“In a dream you saw a way to survive and you were full of joy.”

“Your tears do not wash away your sorrows. They feed someone else's joy. And that is why you must learn to swallow your own tears.”

“The real struggle has been since Africans first set foot on the continent, an affirmation of the value of one’s self. And I think if, in order to participate in American society, in order to accomplish some of the things which the black middle class has accomplished, if you have had to give up that self in order to accomplish that, then you are not making an affirmation of the value of the African being. You are saying that in order to do that I must become someone else, I must become like someone else…”

“I realize full well how hard it must be to go on living alone in a place from which someone has left you, but there is nothing so cruel in this world as the desolation of having nothing to hope for.”