After graduating in the summer of 1980, I knew I wanted my life to count.

Shortly thereafter, some friends encouraged me to try out for the Miss South Carolina World beauty pageant. To my surprise, I won - and was sent to New York City to compete nationally.

Although I'd first seen Senator Hart in Aspen, Colorado, at a New Year's Day party in 1987, we hadn't talked.

I was always an overachiever.

In my case, I learned that although God loves us, he doesn't grant us immunity from the consequences of our choices.

Returning to South Carolina meant getting a normal job in a normal town with normal people and marrying a normal person. I wanted the glamour and opportunity of the world.

Since it was too difficult to get into the Screen Actor's Guild in New York, I moved to Miami in 1982 and started a successful career as a television commercial actress, obtaining my SAG card there.

I've had to recover not only from a single well-publicized incident, but several years of press aftermath.

It was hard to turn down the money since I didn't have a job, but I didn't want to exploit my notoriety because I knew the way I'd been living was wrong.

At thirteen I began modeling, doing my first television commercial in ninth grade for Pizza Hut.

Before the group left, Gary asked for my phone number, and the next day he called to ask me to dinner that night. I had no idea he was married, but I found out that night.

The poet is a Cyclops in the Kingdom of the Blind whose sole cure for the madness of his vision must be starvation.

It's not good to dig in the past, raise the ghost up from the grave, and have it walk with the flesh.

The degree of freedom from unwanted thoughts and the degree of concentration on a single thought are the measures to gauge spiritual progress.

The clear, unmistakable sign of a bureaucrat is somebody who worries about whether he has a window.

When I say 'I will be true to you' I am drawing a quiet space beyond the reach of other desires.

In other words, more violent tornadoes would, if anything, be a sign of 'global cooling', not 'global warming'.

It is said that love is blind. Friendship, on the other hand, is clairvoyant.

I've often called mothers the greatest spiritual teachers in the world.

Humility is not denying your strengths, humility is being honest about your weaknesses.

In the corporate-owned media, men dressed like Ronald Reagan and women dressed like Rita Hayworth disseminate grotesque exaggerations and gossip in authoritative tones.