We are God's partners in matters of life and death.

You can’t let your failures define you. You have to let your failures teach you.

Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.

Keep exploring. Keep dreaming. Keep asking why. Don’t settle for what you already know. Never stop believing in the power of your ideas, your imagination, your hard work to change the world.

When ignorant folks want to advertise their ignorance, you don't really have to do anything, you just let them talk.

Just because we have the best hammer does not mean that every problem is a nail.

Change is never easy, but always possible.

Don’t ever let anybody tell you that your efforts don’t matter or that your voice doesn’t count. Don’t ever believe that you can’t make a difference. You have.

Where you are right now doesn't have to determine where you'll end up.

Learning to stand in somebody else's shoes, to see through their eyes, that's how peace begins. And it's up to you to make that happen. Empathy is a quality of character that can change the world.

If somebody is different from you, that's not something you criticize, that's something that you appreciate.

Maybe the hardest thing in writing is simply to tell the truth about things as we see them.

And why is it that so many years later it is so easy to distinguish the bullies from their prey? Adult bodies surrounding the children of long ago. The years have changed nothing.

We never know the journey another person has walked, so be kind to everyone.

Jealousy is never satisfied with anything short of an omniscience that would detect the subtlest fold of the heart.

I'm constantly meeting people who said that they cast their first vote for me, or that they cut their eye teeth on the 1972 campaign, or that they didn't vote for me but admire my positions.

Before I write a novel, images float around in my head that work like icons - they are meaningless in themselves, but serve as reminders.

I looked at my reflection in the rearview mirror. Some lipstick would go with this truck, I thought.

He came over and ruffled my hair, which is technically assault. I could get on the blower to ChildLine.

There's the psychotic ambitious side of myself that wants a fashion line and my own network and be like a combination of Oprah and Gwen Stefani. And have a perfume. Definitely a perfume.

What we do really affects the world. Most of us think we can't do anything, but it really isn't true.