When you're young you think that you're going to sail into a lovely lake of quietude and peace. This is profoundly untrue.

We use our parents like recurring dreams, to be entered into when needed.

A simple grateful thought turned heavenwards is the most perfect prayer.

Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.

If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air.

Every child has the capacity to be everything.

Any human anywhere will blossom in a hundred unexpected talents and capacities simply by being given the opportunity to do so.

What's terrible is to pretend that second-rate is first-rate. To pretend that you don't need love when you do; or you like your work when you know quite well you're capable of better.

Things are not quite so simple always as black and white.

You have to be grown up, really grown up, not merely in years, to understand your parents.

There is nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children.

When I cannot read, when I cannot think, when I cannot even pray, I can trust.

Audrey Hepburn, as famous as she was, packed her own suitcases... I don’t know why that struck me, but it did. 'She has a servant’s heart, ' I thought.

Fear is, I believe, a most effective tool in destroying the soul of an individual - and the soul of a people.

Study without reflection is a waste of time; reflection without study is dangerous.

There ought to be a robust, uninhibited conversation in black America with different black ideological perspectives.

Our New England climate is mild and equable compared with that of the Platte.

I'm more interested in the games than the people.

You have to let the viewers come away with their own conclusions. If you dictate what they should think, you've lost it.

Love is born in sexuality but sexuality is not love. The lotus is born in the mud, but the lotus is not just mud. And if mud remains mud of course there are bound to be tears on the cheeks.

Fighting with the media almost always is a mistake. You can't win the argument, the media has the last word, and most times your argument is not justified.