Through my research, I found that vulnerability is the glue that holds relationships together. It’s the magic sauce.

When the people we love stop paying attention, trust begins to slip away and hurt starts seeping in.

A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives.

My fans don’t feel like I hold anything back from them. They know whatever I’m going through now, they’ll hear about it on a record someday. They’ll hear the real story. There’s a little bit of lag time. It’s not as instant as going on a gossip blog. But it’s much more accurate.

I have found that no exertion of the legs can bring two minds much nearer to one another.

Normally, when someone we love is turning away from a struggle, we self-protect by also turning away. That’s definitely my first response. I think change is more likely to happen if both partners have common language and a shared lens to see problems.

I’m the type person, my safe place to be emotional is the booth.

Then, when I’m in these relationships with people who are also creative, or creative in their own way, what happens is the attraction is initially there and it’s all unicorns and rainbows. And then they hate me.

Part of me feels you can’t say you were truly in love if it didn’t last. If I end up getting married and having kids, that’s when I’ll know it’s real – because it lasted.

But there is a difference between cozying up to power and being close to power.

I have a personal ambition to live my life honestly and honor the true love that I’ve had and also the people I’ve had around me. I want to stay hopeful, even though I get scared about why we’re even alive at all.

Humanity I love you because when you’re hard up you pawn your intelligence to buy a drink.

If you cry over a guy, then your friends can’t date him. It can’t even be considered.

I don’t want to get into it, but if you know someone, it doesn’t mean you agree with everything they say or they do.

If you think dealing with issues like worthiness and authenticity and vulnerability are not worthwhile because there are more pressing issues, like the bottom line or attendance or standardized test scores, you are sadly, sadly mistaken. It underpins everything.

Remember that no relationship is a total waste of time. You can always learn something about yourself.

There are too many accidents that can befall life on a single planet.

There is no such thing as society: there are individual men and women, and there are families.

But that intimacy of mutual embarrassment, in which each feels that the other is feeling something, having once existed, its effect is not to be done away with.

If you look at the history of our country over the last 100 years, there have been periods where science and research have been celebrated. They were really kind of held up as heroes in society, which encouraged a generation of people to go into these fields.

Assuming if there’s such a thing as reality, if you have a false relationship with it, how can you do anything but fail?

Funny is the world I live in. You’re funny, I’m interested. You’re not funny, I’m not interested.

It’s fun to be hopelessly in love. It’s dangerous, but it’s fun.

I think we have to own the fears that we have of each other, and then, in some practical way, some daily way, figure out how to see people differently than the way we were brought up to.

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.

Love is like a virus. It can happen to anybody at any time.

Friendship is the marriage of the soul, and this marriage is liable to divorce.

Friendship with ones self is all important, because without it one cannot be friends with anyone else in the world.

A man has a tendency to accept you the way you are, while most women immediately start to pick flaws and want to change you.

People hate as they love, unreasonably.

I have trust issues with allowing other individuals to know my innermost secrets for fear of how I may be viewed. Everyone has this.

Faith is the complete reliance on the power and goodness of Spirit and the firm belief that you are always connected to this goodness. Always affirm your faith and not your doubt.

Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is far the best ending for one.

I have an urge to communicate. I think I’m a change from what it would be like dating a normal guy who doesn’t talk too much.

I can’t go out with a Republican.

If I wouldn’t have found Courtney, I probably would have carried on with a bisexual lifestyle.

Truth is everybody is going to hurt you: you just gotta find the ones worth suffering for.

Ultimately, who you choose to be in a relationship with and what you do in your bedroom is your business.

There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love.

Maids want nothing but husbands, and when they have them, they want everything.

Love can consign us to hell or to paradise, but it always takes us somewhere.

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

Whatever woman may cast her lot with mine, should any ever do so, it is my intention to do all in my power to make her happy and contented; and there is nothing I can imagine that would make me more unhappy than to fail in the effort.

I like someone who is a little crazy but coming from a good place. I think scars are sexy because it means you made a mistake that led to a mess.

My wife thinks she’s better than me at puzzles. I haven’t given in on that one yet.

It is plain indeed that in spite of later estrangement Hobbits are relatives of ours: far nearer to us than Elves, or even than Dwarves. Of old they spoke the languages of Men, after their own fashion, and liked and disliked much the same things as Men did. But what exactly our relationship is can no longer be discovered.

If we lose love and self respect for each other, this is how we finally die.

The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of because words diminish your feelings – words shrink things that seem timeless when they are in your head to no more than living size when they are brought out.

If you treat people right they will treat you right… ninety percent of the time.

It isn’t necessary to have relatives in Kansas City in order to be unhappy.

So then, the relationship of self to other is the complete realization that loving yourself is impossible without loving everything defined as other than yourself.

I make friends faster and easier than journalists.

Love is an interesting thing.

It’s been proven by quite a few studies that plants are good for our psychological development. If you green an area, the rate of crime goes down. Torture victims begin to recover when they spend time outside in a garden with flowers. So we need them, in some deep psychological sense, which I don’t suppose anybody really understands yet.

How marriage ruins a man! It is as demoralizing as cigarettes, and far more expensive.

I carry a small sheet of paper in my wallet that has written on it the names of people whose opinions of me matter. To be on that list, you have to love me for my strengths and struggles.

All of the people in my life whom I consider to be close friends or colleagues are good thinkers.

I’ve never had a divorce, but I’ve seen so many of my friends, my sister, my family go through that stuff, so I try to write for the people that can’t write about it. I take on their sorrow, so I’m able to kind of express it, or their joy.

No one can live without relationship. You may withdraw into the mountains, become a monk, a sannyasi, wander off into the desert by yourself, but you are related. You cannot escape from that absolute fact. You cannot exist in isolation.

No one would choose a friendless existence on condition of having all the other things in the world.

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.