Discipline is like knowing the rules of a game; once you understand them, you can play freely and even win.

“How in hell is anybody supposed to help you if you won’t ask?” Because asking is dangerous, I could tell her. Because to ask is to hope that someone answers, and it hurts so bad when nobody does.

Never trust a writer who doesn’t have too many books to read. Or a reader, for that matter.

Live long enough, you realize some folks can be handed a problem and some tools, and they’ll sort it out. And I never think twice about hiring that sort of fellow.

You made a haunted house out of your own flesh and bones.

An anthology of short stories by Black authors redefining the horror genre.

A dark fiction anthology by indigenous writers.

I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe.

The internet’s a great place for finding out about stuff you’re kind of interested in, but it can’t really help with the things you really want to know. It’s even worse for things you don’t know anything about.

Mathematics is not just a sequence of computations to be carried out by rote until your patience or stamina runs out—although it might seem that way from what you’ve been taught in courses called mathematics.

How many women throughout history were blamed for the weaknesses of men? We made such convenient scapegoats. We were raised to be small, to be silent, to take whatever we were given and no more.

When you’re an only child, semi-imprisoned, books become more than paper between hard cardboard, more than the alphabet organized into words and printed on a page.

The city in the south would go the way of limestone, crumbling into the desert until nothing was left but an archaeological layer of dark gray ash and sorrow.

No single human can work to save the orcas and protect the Amazon and organize anti-fracking protests and write poetry that inspires others to act and pray in a hermit’s dwelling for transformation and get dinner on the table. How easy is it to feel paralyzed by obligations.

The Coast Salish people think trees have personhood too. They teach that the forest is made of many nations living side by side in peace, each contributing to this earth.

Fear is generous and does not exclusively live in the hearts of mortals.

Can you imagine the colonized fighting on behalf of the colonizer to protect the colonizer from being colonized?

Imagine if our negative feelings, or at least lots of them, turned out to be illusions, and we could dispel them by just contemplating them from a particular vantage point.