human animals and nonhuman animals can communicate quite well; if we are brought up around animals as children we take this for granted. By the time we are adults we no longer remember.

I have fallen in love with the imagination. And if you fall in love with the imagination, you understand that it is a free spirit. It will go anywhere, and it can do anything.

Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender.

The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any.

No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.

Look closely at the present you are constructing: it should look like the future you are dreaming.

Whenever you are creating beauty around you, you are restoring your own soul.

I don’t need a certain number of friends, just a number of friends I can be certain of.

Every small positive change we make in ourselves repays us in confidence in the future.

In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they're still beautiful.

'Thank you' is the best prayer that anyone could say. I say that one a lot. Thank you expresses extreme gratitude, humility, understanding.

My tongue thirsty for superiority, maybe even immortality, ruled me. I was ruled by my tongue. I was ruled by women. I was ruled by alcohol.

But life isn’t about learning to forgive those who have hurt you or forgetting your past. It’s about learning to forgive yourself for being human and making mistakes.

There is always madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.

The world that we live in is made up of two phases, the real world and the fantasy world

It is, perhaps, one of the hardest struggles of the Christian life to learn this sentence-- "Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us, but unto Thy name be glory."

I know of no genius but the genius of hard work.

There’s no need to glamorize one body type and slam another. We need to stop this absurd hatred towards bodies for being different sizes. It doesn’t help anyone and it’s getting old.

I realize I had to learn ... to stop chasing the perishable prizes of this earth ... and give my best effort unto God and trust Him with the results.

Always get to the dialogue as soon as possible. I always feel the thing to go for is speed. Nothing puts the reader off more than a big slab of prose at the start.

It's really unimaginable that I could start where I was and get here today.