I came to water late. I learned to swim at the age of 20.

I first learned that there were black people living in some place called other than the United States in the western hemisphere when I was a very little boy and my father told me that when he was a boy about my age he wanted to be an Episcopal priest because he so admired his priest a black man from someplace called Haiti.

The face you have at age 25 is the face God gave you but the face you have after 50 is the face you earned.

In this age which believes that there is a short cut to everything the greatest lesson to be learned is that the most difficult way is in the long run the easiest.

Books were my pass to personal freedom. I learned to read at age three and soon discovered there was a whole world to conquer that went beyond our farm in Mississippi.

You end up as you deserve. In old age you must put up with the face the friends the health and the children you have earned.