I tell my students, 'When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.

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Make a difference about something other than yourselves.

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You are your own stories and therefore free to imagine and experience what it means to be human... And although you don't have complete control over the narrative - no author does, I can tell you - you could nevertheless create it.

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The peace I am thinking of is the dance of an open mind when it engages another equally open one.

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Your life is already artful-waiting, just waiting, for you to make it art.

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I am a writer and my faith in the world of art is intense, but not irrational, nor naïve - because art takes us and makes us take a journey beyond price, beyond cost, into bearing witness to the world as it is and as it should be. Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it, summon it, from even the most tragic of circumstances.

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I want to discourage you from choosing anything or making any decision simply because it is safe. Things of value seldom are.

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All important things are hard.

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Racism will disappear when it's no longer profitable, and no longer psychologically useful. And when that happens, it'll be gone. But at the moment, people make a lot of money off of it, pro and con.

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Liberation means you don't have to be silenced.

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