“Understanding is not absolutely final.What’s now right could be wrong later.”

“First-person narrators is the way I know how to write a book with the greatest power and chance of artistic success.”

“What Waringa tried hard to avoid was looking at the pictures of the walls and windows of the church. Many of the pictures showed Jesus in the arms of the virgin Mary or on the cross. But others depicted the devil, with two cow-like horns and a tail like a monkey’s, raising one leg in a dance of evil, while his angels, armed with burning pitchforks, turned over human beings on a bonfire. The Virgin Mary, Jesus and God’s angels were white, like European, but the devil and his angels were black.”

“As she stared at them, Waringa noted that their skins were indeed red, like that of pigs or like the skin of a black person who has been scalded with boiling water or who has burned himself with acid creams. Even the hair in their arms and necks stood out stiff and straight like the bristle of an aging hog.”

“Consider the difference between the first and third person in poetry […] It’s like the difference between looking at a person and looking through their eyes.”

“Every story has already been told. Once you’ve read Anna Karenina, Bleak House, The Sound and the Fury, To Kill a Mockingbird and A Wrinkle in Time, you understand that there is really no reason to ever write another novel. Except that each writer brings to the table, if she will let herself, something that no one else in the history of time has ever had.”[Commencement Speech; Mount Holyoke College, May 23, 1999]”

“If I don’t ‘see’ life as a gift I might be ‘seeing’ something, but it’s not life.”

“An ant can’t define shape of an elephant solely from its’ point of view.They have to unify all views. It’s a way for ant to understand elephant.In order to understand true realities, men need to do mental blending.”

“Smartass Disciple: Master, I’m going to change the whole world.Master of Stupidity: It changes within you. It changes without you.”