Now, I am perfectly willing to just enjoy my career by choosing roles simply because I consider them to be a challenge and doing the best possible job I can.

There's a path in this life with your name on it. What God means you to have, no one can take away from you. It's already yours. Our mission, as God's children, is to surrender to what he has ordained -- and to freely let all else just pass us by.

In my early years, there were a number of experiences that made me decide I could not afford the luxury of just being an actress. There were a number of issues I wanted to address. And I wanted to use my career as a platform.

I think when you begin to think of yourself as having achieved something, then there's nothing left for you to work towards. I want to believe that there is a mountain so high that I will spend my entire life striving to reach the top of it.

When I told my mother that I wanted to be an actress, she said, you can't live here and do that, and so I moved out. I was determined to prove her wrong because she was so sure that I was going to go astray. And that's the juice that kept me going.

I have learned not to allow rejection to move me.

Resentment corrodes the veins of the person who carries it.

That is, in this life, who we are for one another -- fellow sojourners and witnesses. We are here to see and hear one another.

When you give yourself away, when you surrender yourself as a divine vessel, … you impact lives eternally.

You never know what motivates you.

Ali... we should have gone to see that movie. Malcolm X was another one.

Challenges make you discover things about yourself that you never really knew.

We have to support our own films. If we don't, how can we expect others to support them?

My mother was an introvert and quite religious. And we were brought up in the church. And when she learned that I wanted to act, she simply said: 'You cannot live here and do that.'

When you don't know your true value, you see the world through the lens of how you don't measure up.

One of the things I have always said about the man-woman relationship is that I don't want anybody to walk ahead of me and I don't want anybody to walk behind me. I want a man who will walk along beside me. And that's how I feel about equal rights.

One lady told me that before she saw 'Sounder' she didn't believe black people could love each other, have deep relationships in the same way as white people.

I didn't want to be an actress; I never thought of being an actress because, as children, there were three of us -- I was the middle child -- and we spent our time in church from Sunday morning to Saturday night.

Age is just a number. Life and aging are the greatest gifts that we could possibly ever have.

I was in California when this journalist made a blanket statement about the fact that she did not think that black men and women had the kind of love relationship that Rebecca and Nathan had in Sounder.