I was going to be a scientist.

The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love and to be greater than our suffering.

The magician and the politician have much in common: they both have to draw our attention away from what they are really doing.

We have not yet arrived, but every point at which we stop requires a re-definition of our destination.

When you can imagine you begin to create and when you begin to create you realize that you can create a world that you prefer to live in, rather than a world that you're suffering in.

We have fallen into this very mean description of humanity. Naturalism in fiction is too reductive in its definition of human beings.

Beware of the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world.

There ought to be three traditions in the art of humanity: the realistic, the visionary and the wild.

Stories are the secret reservoir of values: change the stories individuals and nations live by and tell themselves, and you change the individuals and nations.

The law is simple. Every experience is repeated or suffered till you experience it properly and fully the first time.

What you see is what you make. What you see in a people is what you eventually create in them.

We learn from every experience to be wise.

The energy of youth with the experience of age is a lethal combination.

Only in a crowded, diverse place like New York, surrounded by strangeness, do I come home to myself.

If our counseling is truly Christ-centered, then the topic of forgiveness will inevitably come up in the journey toward growth and change.

There’s a reason why the Super Bowl is watched way more than the NBA Finals and World Series.

Everything in tennis is so neat and nice but boxing has sport down to its essence; it is very pure and I like that.

A little oil makes machinery work easy.

Marian Palaia is a writer of startling grace and sensuous lyricism - reading her, you feel as if you've never heard language this beautiful and this true.

What else is nature but God?

I have more zits now than I did as a teenager. Stress zits.