“Mama is beautiful,” I said.“Mama is strong,” he said. “Beauty comes and goes. Strength, you keep forever.”

“To make it a crime for public institutions to serve the undocumented simply isolated people and drove them into poverty, she wrote. From then on, people who came looking for a library card received one, regardless of whether their papers were in order.”

“Mama is beautiful,” I said.“Mama is strong,” he said. “Beauty comes and goes. Strength, you keep forever.”

“I wouldn't wish beauty on any woman who has not her own freedom, and who chooses not the hands that claim her.”

“Today you live, child. Tomorrow, you dream.”

“To gaze into another persons face is to do two things: to recognise their humanity and to assert your own.”

“But I have long loved the written word, and come to see in it the power of the sleeping lion. This is my name. This is who I am. This is how I got here. In the absence of an audience, I will write down my story so that it waits like a restful beast with lungs breathing and heart beating.”