“The wisest man has something yet to learn.”

“To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blood.”

“Nothing can so pierce the soul as the uttermost sigh of the body.”

“Men have feverishly conceived a heaven only to find it insipid, and a hell to find it ridiculous.”

“The Difficult is that which can be done immediately; the Impossible that which takes a little longer.”

“I had wanted to escape my traveling childhood, yet I was traveling and making the discovery that ordinary people are smart, smart people are ordinary, decisions are best made by the people affected by them, and human beings have an almost infinite capacity for adapting to the expectations around us - which is both the good and the bad news” 

“Rhyming in itself is magic.” 

“Reading in the car was so much my personal journey that when my mother urged me to put down my book and look out the window, I would protest, “But I just looked an hour ago!” 

“After all, hope is a form of planning. If our hopes weren’t already real within us, we couldn’t even hope them.” 

“The purpose of ass-kicking is not that your ass gets kicked at the right time or for the right reason,” she often explained. “It’s to keep your ass sensitive.” 

“If I could, I would leave an open space for your story on every page.” 

“she is still better known than most living movie stars, most world leaders, and most television personalities. The surprise is that she rarely has been taken seriously enough to ask why that is so.” 

“I can go on the road - because I can come home. I come home - because I'm free to leave. Each way of being is more valued in the presence of the other. This balance between making camp and following the seasons is both very ancient and very new. We all need both.” 

“If you do anything people care about, people will take care of you.” 

“I recommend trying this kind of grassroots organizing for a week or a year, a month or a lifetime—working for whatever change you want to see in the world. Then one day you will be talking to a stranger who has no idea you played any part in the victory she or he is celebrating.” 

“Home is a symbol of the self. Caring for a home is caring for one’s self.” 

“if you don’t stand up for yourselves, how can you stand up for anybody else?” 

“There is no such thing as a perfect leader. We have to learn to lead ourselves.” 

“Taking away the good is even more lethal than pointing out the bad.” 

“The first step toward speaking for others is speaking for ourselves.” 

“It also reminds me of an organizing principle: Anybody who is experiencing something is more expert in it than the experts.” 

“I think we each come out of the womb with some unique way of looking at the world and if we don't express it, we loose faith in ourselves.” 

“History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there. . . . History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten”

“Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.”