Quotes from Maya Soetoro-Ng

Faith and optimism come from love.

Government is supposed to lead by example in many cases. Government that's not particularly caring and is hands-off is not particularly inspiring.

I think a lot about our globalized world, our global interconnectedness, and it really saddens me when I see people 'othering,' when I see people who are willing to live narrowly.

That's a powerful way to love, when you accept your children, however they emerge, with all their peculiarities.

My mother was a courageous woman, and she had such tremendous love for life. She loved the natural world. She would wake us up in the middle of the night to go look at the moon. When I was a teenager, this was a source of great frustration because I wanted to sleep.

Slow down and think about the lessons of the elders.

We all have a limited amount of good judgment.

My hope is that I can continue writing and, in the future, I can just be Maya Soetoro-Ng.

My mother would have enjoyed the idea that her name was being used to build bridges. She cared a great deal and was very thoughtful and passionate about education and young women.

I'm half white, half Asian. I think of myself as hybrid. People usually think I'm Latina when they meet me. That's what made me learn Spanish.

One of the things that I have my students do is to take a look at English-language newspapers from all around the world in order to see the different ways in which the same story might be told.

This is not a family of privilege by any stretch of the imagination. Our family is very low key.

I think you can have varied and seemingly contradictory depictions of a single person because we all have many facets and, in a way, many selves.

My whole family was Muslim, and most of the people I knew were Muslim.