Women in Somalia face almost unimaginable oppression.

Every day I have many choices to make about who I want to be.

I think it's the human spirit inside of all of us that has an enormous capacity to survive.

The road to recovery will not always be easy, but I will take it one day at a time, focusing on the moments I've dreamed about for so long.

I'm afraid of elevators, because they are an enclosed space, but I get in.

Contemplating Christmas when you are isolated and far from home brings its own unique pain.

Christmas was the one time of year when my brothers surfaced at home, when my parents and grandparents congregated to eat my mother's roast turkey.

Getting on a plane is hard for me, but I do it, because travel is vital to me.

I've realized that the world is, in essence, full of banana peels - loaded with things that may unwittingly trip an internal wire in my mind, opening a floodgate of fears without warning.

I used my captors names every chance I had. It was intentional, a way of reminding them that I saw them, of pegging them, of making them see me in return.

Forgiving is not an easy thing to do.

The pen is mightier than the sword unless it's a real sword in which case the guy with the pen should run away fast.

...our minds are driven to answer questions that far transcend the bounds of our own lives.

Every artifact of human culture is a positive response to God's general revelation and simultaneously a rebellious assertion against His sovereign rule over us.

Some blind faithfully

...what she had been waiting to see on someone else's face was not empathy but the companionship of unmitigated suffering...

You have to feel you're the best at what you do. You don't have to come out and say it. But you have to know it within yourself.

I don't think I ever understood Hollywood.

You're trying your damndest, you strike out and they boo you. I act like it doesn't bother me, like I don't hear anything the fans say, but the truth is I hear every word of it and it kills me.

A desert is a place without expectation.

Of the present state, whatever it be, we feel and are forced to confess the misery; yet when the same state is again at a distance, imagination paints it as desirable.