We may act sophisticated and worldly but I believe we feel safest when we go inside ourselves and find home, a place where we belong and maybe the only place we really do.

I am convinced that words are things, and we simply don't have the machinery to measure what they are. I believe that words are tangible things...

I believe that one can never leave home. I believe that one carries the shadows, the dreams, the fears and the dragons of home under one's skin, at the extreme corners of one's eyes and possibly in the gristle of the earlobe.

Even in the mud and scum of things, something always, always sings.

I believe that each of us comes from the Creator trailing wisps of glory.

Sorrow looks back, worry looks around, faith looks up.

I do not think of myself as unusually creative. I think we all come from the creator, each human being streaming with the glory. So each one of us is creative.

Original thinking migrates each day in search of nourishment.

Some of us are timid. We think we have something to lose so we don't try for that next hill.

If you're for the right thing, you do it without thinking.

The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be.

The soul is no traveler; the wise man stays at home, and when his necessities, his duties, on any occasion call him from his house, or into foreign lands, he is at home still.

By no amount of agile exercising of a wistful imagination could my mother have been called lenient. Generous she was; indulgent never. Kind, yes, permissive, never. In her world, people she accepted paddled their own canoes, pulled their own weight, put their own shoulders to their own plows and pushed like hell.

I will not sit in a room with black people when the N word is used. I know it was meant to belittle a person, so I will not sit there and have that poison put on me. Now a black person can say, 'Oh, you know, I can use this word because I'm black.'

I've learned that making a 'living' is not the same thing as 'making a life'.

Life loves the person who dares to live it.

Life loves the person who dares to live it.

Life is pure adventure, and the sooner we realize that, the quicker we will be able to treat life as art.

To grow up is to stop putting blame on parents

You can only become great at something you are willing to sacrifice for

I had read a Tale of Two Cities and found it up to my standards as a romantic novel. She opened the first page and I heard poetry for the first time in my life...her voice slid in and curved down trough and over the words. She was nearly singing.

I am convinced that most people do not grow up...We marry and dare to have children and call that growing up. I think what we do is mostly grow old. We carry accumulation of years in our bodies, and on our faces, but generally our real selves, the children inside, are innocent and shy as magnolias.

I was born in St. Louis but lived there just for a few minutes in my life.

My life has been one great big joke, a dance that's walked a song that's spoke, I laugh so hard I almost choke when I think about myself.