I was born in the summer of 1970, the last of five boys stretched over eight years. My parents were a struggling young couple who had been married one afternoon under a shade tree by a preacher without a church. No guests or fancy dress, just the two of them, lost in love, and the preacher taking a break from working on a house.

I was always a relatively quiet and introspective kid.

This is the reason I write, to remind people of honor and courage; to tell them that their cause isn't lost, that their destiny is victory.

I better understood the little lies that liquor told, lifting spirits and drowning sorrows while withholding the whole truth -- that, in the end, it is the spirit in peril of drowning. Sorrows have gills.

There can be moments in your life where you may feel attracted to someone depending on circumstance, depending on the person of one gender or another, and sometimes where that is less of an influence in your life.

What too few people mention when discussing crime is the degree to which concentrated poverty, hopelessness and despair are the chambermaids of violence and incivility.

America is a living idea. It isn't only the tenets of its founding, but also the terms of its future. Every day, we make America. Seeking to preserve and enshrine one vision of this country from one period of its past robs it of what makes it magical: its infinite possibility for adjustment.

No one knows how to hold a grudge like a proper Southerner.

Now you have to decide whether or not you want to be part of the bigotry that is Donald Trump. You have to decide whether you want to be part of the sexism and misogyny that is Donald Trump.

Co-opted convictions will always betray you.

My mother was a stout woman with a man's name -- Billie. She was plain-faced with honest eyes -- no black grease by the lash line, no blue powder on the lids, eyebrows not plucked up high and thin.

I had been fortified by trauma, the way a bone, once broken, grows back stronger than it had been.

I don't know how to describe the sound of a world crashing. Maybe there is no sound, just a great emptiness, an enveloping sorrow, a creeping nothingness that coils itself around you like a stiff wire.

Voter apathy is a civic abdication.

When I was a freshman in college, I went to a broadcast class by mistake. The first day, the instructor said, Television anchors sound like they could be from everywhere and nowhere. From that point on, every time I was near an anchor, when no one was around, they would say something and I would say it right after them. It was this effort to get rid of my accent.

I had set about trying to make myself more polished than a country boy would be.

I write a lot about disadvantaged people, particularly vulnerable children, because I feel that that's who I was. That is familiar terrain for me. And I try to write about things that are very close to me because I want people to feel the passion that I have for the subject.

It was the kind of building that remembered things, deep-down things, things that rode tears into the world, telling them back to anyone old enough or wise enough to know how to listen with their eyes.

The internet is ruthless. And people are very, very happy to let you know when they don't like something.

Great leadership isn't shaped in the absence of opposition but in the presence of it. Great leaders draw us together by our universal humanity; they galvanize the wills of the willing; they draw clarity from the spigot of chaos.