Knowles Quotes

“I had to be right in never talking about what you could not change, and I had to make many people agree that I was right. None of them ever accused me of being responsible for what had happened to Phineas, either because they could not believe it or because they could not understand it. I would have talked about that, but they would not, and I would not talk about Phineas in any other way.”

“Once again I had the desolating sense of having all along ignored what was finest in him. Perhaps it was just the incongruity of seeing him aloft and stricken, since he was by nature someone who carried others. I didn't think he knew how to act or even how to feel as the object of help.”

“I could not escape a feeling that this was my own funeral, and you do not cry in that case.”

“My misery was too deep to speak any more. I scanned the page; I was having trouble breathing, as though the oxygen were leaving the room. Amid its devastation my mind flashed from thought to thought, despairingly in search of something left which it could rely on. Not rely on absolutely, that was obliterated as a possibility, just rely on a little,some solace, something surviving in the ruin.”

“I grew up upper-class. Private school. My dad had a Jaguar. We're African-American, and we work together as a family, so people assume we're like the Jacksons. But I didn't have parents using me to get out of a bad situation.”

“In any relationship, there's gonna be conflict.”

“Everyone talks about how, in your 30s, all of these growing pains transition into wisdom and you feel more self-assured and confident, but I think I had a bit of a jump-start on that at 27.”

“When you really don't like a guy, they're all over you, and as soon as you act like you like them, they're no longer interested.”

“Beyonce has set the tone as an aunt. I've set the tone as a mom.”

“It's so sad, actually, how teachers and parents tell their kids, 'You're never gonna be anything.'”