For some students school is the only place where they get a hot meal and a warm hug. Teachers are sometimes the only ones who tell our children they can go from an Indian reservation to the Ivy League from the home of a struggling single mom to the White House.

I wanted to get us a place of our own with a little bit more space. The kitchen is just huge because my mom... lives there man and she loves being in the kitchen.

My mom used to take me down to the Jersey Shore when I was 7 8 9 years old. I can remember being down in that area - Belmar Seaside Heights Asbury Park and all those places that I went back and revisited.

This is the place where anybody - like an African American kid raised by a single mom - can be president.

In her whole life Mom never earned more than five or six dollars a week. Being without a husband it was hard for her to find any place at all for us to live.

Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom's. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own.

I wanted to escape so badly. But of course I knew I couldn't just give up and leave school. It was only when I heard my mom's voice that I came out of my hiding place.

What affects men sharply about a foreign nation is not so much finding or not finding familiar things it is rather not finding them in the familiar place.

Space and light and order. Those are the things that men need just as much as they need bread or a place to sleep.

I never yet feared those men who set a place apart in the middle of their cities where they gather to cheat one another and swear oaths which they break.