Life Lesson 3: You can't rush grief. It has its own timetable. All you can do is make sure there are lots of soft places around - beds, pillows, arms, laps.

I had this odd sibling rivalry with America.

You know, if you hang around this earth long enough you really see how things come full circle.

It takes strength to make your way through grief, to grab hold of life and let it pull you forward.

And as far as false hope, there is no such thing. There is only hope or the absence of hope - nothing else.

Christopher Reeve understood that everything begins with hope. His vision of walking again, his belief that he would be able to in his lifetime, towered over his broken body.

Stories live in your blood and bones, follow the seasons and light candles on the darkest night-every storyteller knows she or he is also a teacher.

Alzheimer's disease locks all the doors and exits. There is no reprieve, no escape.

[On her father, Ronald Reagan:] How do you argue with someone who states that the people who are sleeping on the grates of the streets of America 'are homeless by choice'?

When I was a child, our summer days were spent swimming; chlorine in my hair was like perfume to me.

Politics isn't what defines a person, and it shouldn't define a relationship. I made the mistake of letting that intrude on my relationships.

Words are God’s gift to mend a broken soul.

And let me ask you this: the dead, where aren't they?

Success is the result of actions. Stop wishing and start doing.

The business of a scientific school is the dissemination of useful knowledge, and this is a noble enterprise and indispensable withal; society can not exist unless it goes on.

We all had our miseries. But to despair was to wish back for something already lost. Or to prolong what was already unbearable. -Suyuan

I feel like when I'm on stage, when I'm writing songs, singing songs, I'm in the studio, I'm shooting videos, I kind of get to become this character, and I can make that whatever I want to make that.

Of compelling consideration is the fact that words acquire scope and function from the history of events which they summarize.

If you really think about it, when watching television, you have product placement all the time.

The great majority of those who speak of perfectibility as a dream, do so because they feel that it is one which would afford them no pleasure if it were realized.

Brother says he's telling about you playing Doctor with that girl.