I tend to find the ecstasy hidden in ordinary joys, because I did not expect those joys to be ordinary to me.

Grief is depression in proportion to circumstance; depression is grief out of proportion to circumstance.

It is nearly impossible to hate anyone whose story you know.

The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality, and it was vitality that seemed to seep out of me.

We cannot bear a pointless torment, but we can endure great pain if we believe that it's purposeful.

A sense of humor is the best indicator that you will recover; it is often the best indicator that people will love you. Sustain that and you have hope.

I can see the beauty of glass objects fully at the moment when they slip from my hand

I believe that words are strong, that they can overwhelm what we fear when fear seems more awful than life is good.

We don't seek the painful experiences that hew our identities, but we seek our identities in the wake of painful experiences.

Life is enriched by difficulty; love is made more acute when it requires exertion.

When you believe that you cannot stitch your own heart back together, go to work on the hearts of other people; there is no surer way to repair yourself than to repair them.

If you see a group of people struggling over generations and you attribute those struggles to bad character, then you do not truly believe we are all created equally.

Zeal without knowledge is fire without light.

I believe that tracks speak to me. Some tracks make me write certain music or make me feel sad or inspire me to write a sad love song. Each track has its feeling to me.

I like to come to Washington, D.C., at least once a year. Why should my tax money travel more than I do?

I did not come to Washington to raise the electricity rates by as much as $40 per month as this plan would do.

In the first half of the 20th Century, we lived through human disasters on a scale unimaginable. The Holocaust was once suggested would be the end of not only civilization, but art, too.

I kind of have to pinch myself. A lot of my dreams are coming true.

I'm not very active politically. The causes I work on offer immediate, practical, accessible help, and politics has never meant that to me

The ability to make music is a gift that you're born with; it's not something you can learn.

Underwear is everything because we all know that if we have on the wrong pair of underwear it ruins your day.