You Deserve To Take Up Space.

It Is Easy To Romanticize Poverty, To See Poor People As Inherently Lacking Agency And Will. It Is Easy To Strip Them Of Human Dignity, To Reduce Them To Objects Of Pity. This Has Never Been Clearer Than In The View Of Africa From The American Media, In Which We Are Shown Poverty And Conflicts Without Any Context.

There Are Some Things That Are So Unforgivable That They Make Other Things Easily Forgivable.

I Am Drawn, As A Reader, To Detail-drenched Stories About Human Lives Affected As Much By The Internal As By The External, The Kind Of Fiction That Jane Smiley Nicely Describes As 'first And Foremost About How Individuals Fit, Or Don't Fit, Into Their Social Worlds.'

I Was Stained By Failure.

Never Ever Accept 'because You Are A Woman' As A Reason For Doing Or Not Doing Anything.