I understand better than she'd imagine that history is indelible. You can mask it; you can patch it smooth and clear; but you always know what's hidden underneath.

Everytime I look at a zebra, I can't figure out whether it's black with white stripes or white with black stripes, and that frustrates me.

Love is not a because, it's a no matter what.

The human capacity for burden is like bamboo- far more flexible than you'd ever believe at first glance.

There are two ways to be happy: improve your reality, or lower your expectations.

There's always going to be bad stuff out there. But here's the amazing thing -- light trumps darkness, every time. You stick a candle into the dark, but you can't stick the dark into the light.

You can't look back - you just have to put the past behind you, and find something better in your future.

Until this moment, I had not realized that someone could break your heart twice, along the very same fault lines.

The wolves knew when it was time to stop looking for what they'd lost, to focus instead on what was yet to come.

If you have a sister and she dies, do you stop saying you have one? Or are you always a sister, even when the other half of the equation is gone?

‎Pick ten strangers and stick them in a room, and ask them which of us they feel sorrier for - you or me - and we all know who they'll choose.

...it is love, imperfect and unordered, that keeps them apart, even as it holds them somehow together...

Plant trees. They give us two of the most crucial elements for our survival: oxygen and books.

All art is concerned with coming into being; for it is concerned neither with things that are, or come into being by necessity, nor with things that do so in accordance with nature.

We have to be there to get the evidence like what happened in Aleppo when we had evidence. And because the United States didn't send the team, we sent the evidence to the Russians.

The media loves negative spin.

I wouldn't even know - and I spent three years in the CIA - I wouldn't even know how you'd start a covert action program in a place like Iran. It would be extraordinarily difficult.

If the splitter of hairs has a sharp enough knife, the fact of life itself can be chopped into nothing.

He who picks up one end of a stick picks up the other. He who chooses the beginning of a road chooses the place it leads to. It is the means that determine the end.

A leader can give up anything - except final responsibility.

Whatever life we have experienced, if we can tell our story to someone who listens, we find it easier to deal with our circumstances.