One is loved because one is loved. No reason is needed for loving.

The love we give away is the only love we keep.

I love story songs because I’ve always loved books.

Couples are wholes and not wholes, what agrees disagrees, the concordant is discordant. From all things one and from one all things.

Love is a state of being.

Children begin by loving their parents; after a time they judge them; rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.

The more I think about it, the more I realize there is nothing more artistic than to love others.

Part of our tradition as black women is that we are universalists. Black children, yellow children, red children, brown children, that is the black woman’s normal, day-to-day relationship. In my family alone, we are about four different colors.

Friendship improves happiness and abates misery, by the doubling of our joy and the dividing of our grief.

I think love is one of the purest things you can sing about. One of the best things you can sing about.

I don’t keep people around me that aren’t family. You don’t get to stay. Unless you’re eating at the table with us, you’re not part. We eat together, we cry together, we live together, we die together. Everything that we do is for each other, and we care for another.

I like working. That’s when I’m feeling my best. And the people around me know that. My wife knows that.

All religions must be tolerated… for every man must get to heaven in his own way.

Marriage destroyed my relationship with two wonderful men.

I learned a great many years ago that in a fight between husband and wife, a third party should never get between the woman’s skillet and the man’s ax-helve.

You definitely want your kids to understand their heritage, but I don’t want my kids to just focus on being black. They are people. I don’t want them to judge other people or to be judged. I want them to be good people, so good people will treat them accordingly. I preach that to my kids and everything else falls into place.

I’d rather be hated for who I am, than loved for who I am not.

I have fallen in love with the imagination. And if you fall in love with the imagination, you understand that it is a free spirit. It will go anywhere, and it can do anything.

I would be married, but I’d have no wife, I would be married to a single life.

It is most unwise for people in love to marry.

Marriage is like a game of chess except the board is flowing water, the pieces are made of smoke and no move you make will have any effect on the outcome.

I may neither choose who I would, nor refuse who I dislike; so is the will of a living daughter curbed by the will of a dead father.

Let us more and more insist on raising funds of love, of kindness, of understanding, of peace. Money will come if we seek first the Kingdom of God – the rest will be given.

I will never be happy without having someone. Going to sleep alone kills me.

Where lipstick is concerned, the important thing is not color, but to accept God’s final word on where your lips end.

I’d love to date somebody cool, fun, funny.

Friends accept you the way you are.

We’ve got this gift of love, but love is like a precious plant. You can’t just accept it and leave it in the cupboard or just think it’s going to get on by itself. You’ve got to keep watering it. You’ve got to really look after it and nurture it.

My dad was the town drunk. Most of the time that’s not so bad; but New York City?

Disagreement is something normal.

Give a little love to a child, and you get a great deal back.

I don’t believe in doing things to manufacture my body to appeal to what I think people might like.

I’ve never been a boyfriend kind of girl.

By taking a second wife he pays the highest compliment to the first, by showing that she made him so happy as a married man, that he wishes to be so a second time.

You pray for rain, you gotta deal with the mud too. That’s a part of it.

No matter what has happened to you in the past or what is going on in your life right now, it has no power to keep you from having an amazingly good future if you will walk by faith in God. God loves you! He wants you to live with victory over sin so you can possess His promises for your life today!

A happy family is but an earlier heaven.

Unless you love someone, nothing else makes any sense.

Happiness is a hard master, particularly other people’s happiness.

To love one that is great, is almost to be great one’s self.

Although God loves us unconditionally, He does get angry at sin, wickedness and evil. But He is not an angry God. God hates sin, but He loves sinners! He will never approve of sin in your life, but He always loves you and wants to work with you to make progress in living a holy life in Christ.

Why do Jewish divorces cost so much? They’re worth it.

I’m gonna make what I want to make, and other people are gonna like what they’re gonna like. It doesn’t really matter.

The Eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them: there ought to be as many for love.

A lot of the time when I write about the person that I love, I feel like I’m writing about New York.

He who lives in our mind is near though he may actually be far away; but he who is not in our heart is far though he may really be nearby.

The god of love lives in a state of need. It is a need. It is an urge. It is a homeostatic imbalance. Like hunger and thirst, it’s almost impossible to stamp out.

To conceal anything from those to whom I am attached, is not in my nature. I can never close my lips where I have opened my heart.

Life cannot be without relationship, but we have made it so agonizing and hideous by basing it on personal and possessive love. Can one love and yet not possess? You will find the true answer not in escape, ideals, beliefs but through the understanding of the causes of dependence and possessiveness.

Trust is not the same as faith. A friend is someone you trust. Putting faith in anyone is a mistake.

I know when I grew up, it was, if it was daylight outside, get outside. Well, now, with the technological age of computers and everything, everyone’s inside virtually going everywhere they want to go, virtually having relationships, virtually traveling across the neighborhood, virtually going to that island.

Take no thought of who is right or wrong or who is better than. Be not for or against.

He who does not trust enough, Will not be trusted.

We do not know what love is. We know the symptoms of it, the pleasure, the pain, the fear, the anxiety and so on. We try to solve the symptoms, which becomes a wandering in darkness. We spend our days and nights in this, and it is soon over in death.

For beautiful eyes, look for the good in others; for beautiful lips, speak only words of kindness; and for poise, walk with the knowledge that you are never alone.

I know for sure that loves saves me and that it is here to save us all.

What women need to understand is that men don’t communicate. It’s not intentional or on purpose. We’re just not as emotional. You ladies feel like you have to express yourselves.

When I was a child I asked my mother what homosexuality was about and she said – and this was 100 years ago in Germany and she was very open-minded – ‚It’s like hair color. It’s nothing. Some people are blond and some people have dark hair. It’s not a subject.‘ This was a very healthy attitude.

Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.

My mother, I suppose, is still a main figure in my life because her life was so sad and unfair, and she so brave, but also because she was determined to make me into the Sunday-school-recitation little girl I was, from the age of seven or so, fighting not to be.

There is just no comparison between having a dinner date with a man and staying home playing canasta with the girls.