People tend to think that life really does progress for everyone eventually, that people progress, but actually only some people progress. The rest of the people don't.

I have fallen in love with the imagination. And if you fall in love with the imagination, you understand that it is a free spirit. It will go anywhere, and it can do anything.

Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender.

The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any.

No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.

Look closely at the present you are constructing: it should look like the future you are dreaming.

Whenever you are creating beauty around you, you are restoring your own soul.

I don’t need a certain number of friends, just a number of friends I can be certain of.

Every small positive change we make in ourselves repays us in confidence in the future.

In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they're still beautiful.

'Thank you' is the best prayer that anyone could say. I say that one a lot. Thank you expresses extreme gratitude, humility, understanding.

I’m intimidated by the fear of being average.

The sadness inherent in any memory comes from the fact that its object is forgetting.

But why think the more reasons there were to sin, the smaller the sin was?

The true heart of all human beings is the lover of what is.

Some people's affability is more deadly than the violence of coarser souls.

All the time, I've felt that life is a wager and that I probably was getting more out of leading a bohemian existence as a writer than I would have if I didn't.

There's one rule that I have on my movies, which is that anything that you want to do, you can do. But! There's a flip side to that, which is that anything I want you to do, give it a try also.

Every nail driven should be as another rivet in the machine of the universe, you carrying on the work.

The only reason to give a speech is to change the world.

Judges should interpret the law, not make it.