When you only do what is expected of you, you never learn what you would've done had you chosen for yourself.

The past hadn't been erased just because a new future had been handed it.

I don't know very many people who can piece together eloquent prayers when their souls are wounded. Words don't come at those times, but tears do. I have always thought of my tears as prayers.

We are born knowing how to be just. And we die knowing we spent a lifetime pretending we didn't.

No one thinks much about their ability to breathe; they just do it. It's when a person can't breathe, that they suddenly realize they'd been doing something truly marvelous all along.

We moved wordlessly from one room to another, from the room of the dead to the room where time lay in pages everywhere I looked.

When we trust someone, we believe what they tell us is true. We experience it as being true. It's not the experience itself that empowers us to believe it. It is the trust.

Confidence tends to minimize the magnitude of the choice.

Dissecting a book was the same as making sense of life. You have to find a way to interpret life, or you'll go nuts.

Our flaws are obvious, yet we are loved and able to love, if we choose, because there is that bit of the divine still smoldering in us.

You shouldn't imagine things that you haven't a shred of proof happened.

Reading is an important product of language that serves as a foundation of civilization. Without it, humans would essentially function on sound and instinct alone, much like beasts.

They say when you meet the love of your life, time stops, and that's true. What they don't tell you is that when it starts again, it moves extra fast to catch up.

It's in out-of-the-ordinary situations - especially situations of challenge or adversity - that the most important differences between people shine through.

I am afraid that I rather give myself away when I explain," said he. "Results without causes are much more impressive.

If I had ever been set down in any one place and told I was to play there, and nowhere else, for the rest of my life, I should have chosen the Old Course at St. Andrews.

If black people mistrust white people, they are mistrusting racism, and that is appropriate.

Never underestimate a well-dressed bimbo.

I'd liked my first record, it was autobiographical and beautiful.

Outcasts always mourn.

Every cradle asks us, Whence? and every coffin, Whither? The poor barbarian, weeping above his dead, can answer these questions as intelligently as the robed priest of the most authentic creed.