Treating an identity as an illness invites real illness to make a braver stand.

Grief is depression in proportion to circumstance; depression is grief out of proportion to circumstance.

It is nearly impossible to hate anyone whose story you know.

The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality, and it was vitality that seemed to seep out of me.

We cannot bear a pointless torment, but we can endure great pain if we believe that it's purposeful.

A sense of humor is the best indicator that you will recover; it is often the best indicator that people will love you. Sustain that and you have hope.

I can see the beauty of glass objects fully at the moment when they slip from my hand

I believe that words are strong, that they can overwhelm what we fear when fear seems more awful than life is good.

We don't seek the painful experiences that hew our identities, but we seek our identities in the wake of painful experiences.

Life is enriched by difficulty; love is made more acute when it requires exertion.

When you believe that you cannot stitch your own heart back together, go to work on the hearts of other people; there is no surer way to repair yourself than to repair them.

The hard truth is that sometimes we need to lie to ourselves to continue to live

Who is willing to suffer for a Savior they won't even trouble themselves to learn about?

Real leadership is not seeking the applause from followers

To err is human; to admit it, superhuman.

America saw me as a projection of me that I always wanted. Thats why I love going to America so much. I feel like I started off in America exactly how I wanted to start everywhere.

And how can poetry stand up against its new conditions? Its position is perfectly precarious.

I think I was, like, maybe frustrated for many years because I didn't try to direct. And since I made my movie I'm just like, 'It's great.

How they treat you defines them. How you treat others defines you.

It's great to hear someone really care for the soprano saxophone.

The movie industry used to be completely accessible. We all knew people in it, and nobody made a big fuss.