Thoughts, positive or negative, grow stronger when fertilized with constant repetition.

She talked like that. But I understood what she meant. About having another you inside that isn't anything like you. Dorcas and I used to make up love scenes and describe them to each other. It was fun and a little smutty. Something about it bothered me, though. Not the loving stuff, but the picture I had of myself when I did it. Nothing like me. I say myself as somebody I'd seen in a picture show or a magazine. Then it would work. If I pictured myself the way I am it seemed wrong.

She told them that the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine. That if they could not see it, they would not have it.

whether imbued with or struggling against conventional Western views of benighted Africa, their protagonists found the continent to be as empty as that collection plate—a vessel waiting for whatever copper and silver imagination was pleased to place there.

But any time you have a thought in your head about you that didn't come from the heart of God, you're trespassing against your own body.

Many people's circumstances dictate their stances. They become powerless victims of other people's actions and attitudes. They wrongly believe that their physical situation is their condition. The truth is, you do not always have power over what happens to you, but you do have complete control over what happens in you.

Often, the difference between what is and what could be is not measured by the length of the track, but rather by the resistance between our ears.

The victim mentality is one of the deadliest mindsets, because a victim is totally incapable of changing his or her environment. Victims spend massive amounts of time sucking the life out of everyone else because they live in a powerless state of mind. Victims believe that their external world has to change in order for them to be okay. Because a victim is so out of control internally, he or she feels an enormous need to control everyone else.

in reality only a change in the attitude of the individual can bring about a renewal in the spirit of nations. Everything begins with the individual.

Ideas are not intellectuals' toys: ideas have consequences, for good and for ill, in what even intellectuals sometimes call "the real world".

The thing we fear we bring to pass.

No man is defeated without until he has first been defeated within.