But most important of all, she explained that it was all right to say 'No. I disagree.' that was a gift. I understood it was power. The power to think my own thoughts. The power to believe in myself.

My darling girl, when are you going to realize that being normal is not necessarily a virtue? It rather denotes a lack of courage." - Aunt Frances

Others said May was best, that sweet green time when lilacs bloomed and gardens along Main Street were filled with sugary pink peonies and Dutch tulips.

It was a great escape for me and it was a way to take a break from what was going on in my own world, to go into another world.

Be careful what you wish for. I know that for a fact. Wishes are brutal, unforgiving things. They burn your tongue the moment they're spoken and you can never take them back.

I wonder how a lioness will manage in a dovecote. Can you put away your teeth and claws?

The weak are cruel. The strong have no need to be.

Once you know some things, you can't unknow them. It's a burden that can never be given away.

This was what it meant to be human, to know that time moved and all things changed.

No one knows you like a person with whom you've shared a childhood. No one will ever understand you in quite the same way.

The evening had turned sweet and blue.

Everyone has a character but sometimes it becomes less.

Normal, average and ordinary are not a part of my vocabulary. I am an artist after all!

The sooner the jihadis go up to their imagined #heaven, the sooner our earth would be a heaven.

Once you stop clinging and let things be, you'll be free, even of birth and death. You'll transform everything.

A broken heart is not the same as sadness. Sadness occurs when the heart is stone cold and lifeless. On the contrary, there is an unbelievable amount of vitality in a broken heart.

Our little solos are a note in an immense chorus vibrating grandly through the universe, a chorus which accepts and harmonizes the whir of the cricket and the long drum-roll of the stars.

I definitely ran with a pack of hoodlums, that's for sure.

God gave us all exactly the same fingers, arms, legs, and feet, but in our different countries we divided them all a little differently as we feel it, do you understand?

If we pay attention to our tears, they'll show us something about ourselves.

My fighting gospel is T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom. I am never without it.