I fucking love Lucy Liu.

What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age.

I’m not J.J. Abrams, who’s ultimately responsible. I’m just his Asian puppet. Which, by the way, is also the title of my autobiography.

Not a word passes between us, not because we have nothing to say, but because we don’t have to say anything.

Extreme situations don’t change us, they reveal us. But the worst is when we can’t even see what we’ve allowed ourselves to become - or rather, we can’t see what parts of ourselves we’ve allowed to grow out of control. It can happen to anyone.

My mind speaks English, my heart speaks Russian, and my ear prefers French.

In some ways it was easier for my generation. Racism was blatant and obvious. The “Whites Only” signs let us know clearly, what we were up against. Not much has changed, but the system of lies and trickology is much more sophisticated. Today young people have to be highly informed and acutely analytical, or they will be swept up into a whirlpool of lies and deception.

Perhaps what was Caravaggio’s most important contribution to art was that he discovered darkness.

Stop acting so small. You are the universe in ecstatic motion.

When I started, it was all meter maids or the sassy nurse, or the sassy receptionist in the hospital. And I felt like: Are those the only jobs that large, black women have?

aseaofquotes:

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote

(via spanishfaster)

You will be stupid. You will worry your parents. You will question your own choices, your relationships, your jobs, your friends, where you live, what you studied in college, that you went to college at all… If that happens, you’re doing it right.

I believe wholeheartedly, and without apology, that we have a collective responsibility to the children of our communities even if we did not conceive and bear them. Of course, parents can and should raise their children with their own values. But they should be able to do so in a community that provides safe places to play, quality food to eat, terrific schools to attend, and economic opportunities to support them. No individual household can do that alone. We have to build that world together.

Life has a way of testing a person’s will, either by having nothing happen at all, or having everything happen at once.

When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone, and of good cheer—say, traveling in a carriage or walking after a good meal or during the night when I cannot sleep — it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly.