It's the most unhappy people who want to stay alive, because they think they haven't done everything they want to do. They think they haven't had enough time. They feel they've been shortchanged.

Nothing had changed. I was the stupid one again. I was the girl who never understood who she was to people.

My mother gave me a disappointed look. Then I gave her one back. Mine was for everything, not just the sandwich.

I need to figure out the secret. I need to work out how to keep things flying back to me instead of always flying away.

I stared hard, trying to find a pattern. Thinking if I kept looking hard enough, maybe the pieces of the world would fit back together into something I could understand.

You could try to believe what you wanted, but it never worked. Your brain and your heart decided what you were going to believe and that was that. Whether you liked it or not.

It's hard to do that, to decide to believe one thing over another.

That's the difference between you and Greta. She has better things to do. She gets involved in clubs, activities. She has friends. But you? You slump around in that room of yours--

I suppose I'm in that very small group of people who are not waiting for their own story to unfold. If my life was a film, I'd have walked out by now.

But you don't know what it was like. It was just the two of us that afternoon, and then . . . and then it was just me.

...I felt the wall between the world of secrets and the real world start to collapse. I felt the girls from the portrait becoming us and us becoming them...

We would fight not for the political future of a distant city, rather for principles whose destruction would ruin the possibility of peace and security for the peoples of the earth.

The Occupy Wall Street protests are shining a national spotlight on the most powerful, dangerous and secretive economic and political force in America.

Italian-Americans are not the Mafia.

People allow themselves to get distracted; I think ultimately, probably the biggest thing that gets in the way of people doing what they ought to be doing at any point in time is distraction.

People ask me if I'm an artist or an architect. But I think they're the same.

People invest in your ability to deliver to them a more favorable future.

Despair is as hollow and deceptive as hope!

We have to be the change we want in the world.

There is such a difference between coming out of sorrow thankful for relief, and coming out of sorrow full of sympathy with and trust in Him who has released us.

Respect for life and for the dignity of the human person also extends to the rest of creation, which is called to join man in praising God.