"I never swore at them or anything like that. But I gave them a growl. They called me the track star of Timilty School ‘cause I'd chase you down the corridor in a heartbeat."

"I've always been an activist. Even when we were growing up. I had somebody want to beat up my little girlfriend next door and I said, 'Boy, you hit her, you're going to have to hit me, too.'

"I'm a hybrid. I don't wish it on anyone. It's lonely. But I don't know how to be anything else. I feel like that's my calling.”

"His mom came back when I think he was in third grade, and they were moving out of the city, and she's just like: 'I just remember that you cared enough to work with him and nobody else had done that before.'"

“In the public eyes, yeah, everybody says: “They’re a gang” or “They’re a crew.” But I always said it was a family.”

"I like to tell the rednecks that hate blacks and stuff like that: Hey, you want to know something? They checked out DNA to one black guy walking out of Africa 10,000 years ago. And every person on this earth has his DNA marker in it...So we all ARE brothers and sisters. So that’s how we have to look at it."

"Someone opened the door and there were four or five people sitting around the table, all Chinese. And they looked at me in a curious way, you know, 'Who is this person?' And I said, 'I'm here to learn Chinese.'"...

"It’s embarrassing when someone has a fear of you just from the cover of your book. But she doesn’t know. If she had read some of them pages, we would probably have a lot of things similar.”

"When I was back there, before we went on, I could have thrown up at any given moment. You couldn’t grab the script out of my hand, I just kept reading it over and over and over."

"From what my mom has told me, the number one seat, the first seat in a factory, means that you’re the number one seller. And my grandmother sat in that seat. She made clothes for us, just from her scraps and remnant fabric."

“When I started talking to them, and they started talking to me, and they got instantly used to my appearance and everything, and when they saw the artwork I was doing, they were quite surprised.”

“When I told my family I was going to enter the Congregation of Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, they were very surprised. My mother said, “Well, if that’s what God wants for you, what are we going to do?” But I don’t think they really understood.”

“I’m a spontaneous, last-second guy. I’ll be sitting here right now, and I bet you in about an hour and a half, I’ll be in the middle of New Hampshire just because I want to try a pastry I saw on a TV show or something. That’s me.”

"You know how you go through a phase and you dye your hair, or something, or you might try and be really out there? My family thought it was that, so they thought, 'Oh, yeah, she’s going through her little Muslim thing, you know.'"

"One of the things I learned about myself early on was, I was never the smartest person in the room, but I had some ability to get smart people lined up together to do something."

"Eventually I came to the conclusion that actually I can choose this place. I don’t have to be wandering. I can choose this as my home."

"When people look at me, they’re like, 'Oh, well, you’re a happy person.' But I have to be happy, and I have to be strong, because I have kids growing up, you know? Even if I am in the projects, I still gotta be strong and keep a smile on my face."

"In salsa, it was a different atmosphere like I never felt before. The atmosphere is like, me moving in slow motion—I can actually see their faces, if they are smiling or not."

"‘Mr. Williams, I need to see you.’Which meant you were in trouble for something. I mean, it’s the first day of school. I didn’t do anything. Why am I in trouble? Why does he want to see me?"

"My phone rings, 6:30, 7 in the morning, people either asking me for word of the day, or some kind of inspirational word, or they talk to me about their problems. But that's just what I do right now. I'm there for people, in any way I can be."