My life was pouring out my feet and seeping through cracks in the floor; yet still I knelt and did not move, for fear she'd let go my hands. Let me stay, I wanted to beg: Please don't make me go.

She doesn't understand that doors, walls, fences, ceilings - they're helpless to keep out what determinedly desires to get in.

No bird in a cage ever speaks. What is there to say? The sky is everywhere, churning above its head, blue and endless, calling out to it. But the caged bird can't answer anything except 'I cannot'.

Let me fly, let me see things that are hidden from other eyes.

Love is like moonlight or thunder, or rain on a tin roof in the middle of the night; it is one of those things in life that is truly worth knowing.

Strange how love coexists with hate, how they render eachother mute, how the swilling of them together makes a new and softer, sympathetic thing.

A small town has as many eyes as a fly

Words on the page are never prisoners of the page

How does one craft happiness out of something as important, as complicated, as unrepeatable and as easily damaged as life?

I am dying: it's a beautiful word. Like the long slow sigh of the cello: dying. But the sound of it is the only beautiful thing about it.

I suppose that's what happens when you make other people's lives miserable: life gets miserable back at you.

You stay safe, You love. You survive. You laugh and cry and struggle and sometimes you fail and sometimes you succeed. You Push.

I thought I'd lie on the floor and writhe in pain for a while, " he grunted, "It relaxes me.""It does? Oh - you're being sarcastic. That's a good sign probably.

Perhaps in nearly every joy, as certainly in every pleasure, cruelty has its place.

The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.

Sometimes I only succeed in beating myself to death

I wish I had put myself out there a little bit more and experienced people more instead of protecting myself.

I love rock, pop, and funk. I love being able to blend these three and create something unique for people.

Switchfoot is a surfing term… To switch your feet means to take a new stance facing the opposite direction. It's about change and movement, a different way of approaching life and music.

Me being in love with a girl and wanting her to be with me, doing what I need to do to make her stay with me; it affects no one, yet it’s terrifying to people and they think you’re a monster.

My husband's a director, so he understands what I do.