A mother isn’t the person who births you

Empathy is the faculty to resonate with the feelings of others. When we meet someone who is joyful, we smile. When we witness someone in pain, we suffer in resonance with his or her suffering.

Whatever has "wit enough to keep it sweet" defies corruption and outlasts all time; but the wit must be of that outward and visible order which needs no introduction or demonstration at our hands.

We all know we're going to die one day, but who wants to think about it? What's sustainable is joy, pleasure and freedom.

The slight reproach to which the virtue of patriotism is commonly liable, the noble are most likely to incur.

I don't even know what I was running for—I guess I just felt like it.

Our thoughts are free.

The first casualty of war is innocence.

Mexico was most powerfully my father's smile and not, as you might otherwise imagine, not language, not pigment.

Ronnie Spector's hair was taller and meaner and scarier than all four Shangri-La's combined, plus the drummer from the Honeycombs. You just know her rat-tail comb was a switchblade.

The spring sea rising and falling, rising and falling all day.