"Value is not made of money, but a tender balance of expectation and longing."

"He was getting that look he gets, oh boy, like Here comes Moses tromping down off of Mount Syanide with ten fresh ways to wreck your life."

"For if there is any single thing that everyone hopes for most dearly, it must be this: that the youngest outlive the oldest."

"Every life is different because you passed this way and touched history."

"Poor Congo, barefoot bride of men who took her jewels and promised the Kingdom."

"We came from Bethlehem, Georgia bearing Betty Crocker cake mixes into the jungle."

"You can't really know the person standing before you, because always there is some missing piece"

"Maybe he's been in Africa so long he has forgotten that we Christians have our own system of marriage, and it is called Monotony."

"Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say."

"Mr. Shepherd, ye cannot stop a bad thought from coming into your head. But ye need not pull up a chair and bide it sit down."

"A breeze shook rain out of new leaves onto their hair, but in their pursuit of eternity they never noticed the chill."

"When you're given a brilliant child you polish her and let her shine. Pigs in Heaven"

"You can curse the dead or pray for them, but don't expect them to do a thing for you. They're far too interested in watching us, to see what in heaven's name we will do next."

"I learned to write by reading the kind of books I wished I'd written."

"Will you explain to me why people encourage delusional behaviour in children, and medicate it in adults?"

"The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. The most you can do is live inside that hope, running down its hallways, touching the walls on both sides."

"Because I could not stop for death he kindly stopped for me, or paused at least to strike a glancing blow with his sky-blue mouth as he passed."

"What we lose in our great human exodus from the land is a rooted sense, as deep and intangible as religious faith, of why we need to hold on to the wild and beautiful places that once surrounded us."

"Friends, there is nothing like your own family to make you appreciate strangers!"

"You see mother, you had no life of your own. They have no idea. One has only a life of one's own."

"If you can't dress expensive, dress memorable."

"The loudest sound on earth, she thought, is a man with nothing to do."

"Be careful what you give children, for sooner or later you are sure to get it back."

"How is it right to slip free of an old skin and walk away from the scene of the crime? We came, we saw, we took away and we left behind, we must be allowed our anguish and our regrets."

"If you ask me, when something extraordinary shows up in your life in the middle of the night, you give it a name and make it the best home you can."

"But children robbed of love will dwell on magic."

"Lies are infinite in number, and the truth so small and singular."

"This Forest eats itself and lives forever."

"Science doesn't tell us what we should do. It only tells us what is."

"The average food item on a U.S. grocery shelf has traveled farther than most families go on their annual vacations."

"I considered her my ally, because, like me, she was imperfect."

"Why does a woman work ten years to change a man, then complain he's not the man she married?"

"I am simple, complex, generous, selfish, unattractive, beautiful, lazy, and driven."

"How I wish we lived in a time when laws were not necessary to safeguard us from discrimination."

"I'm sure that I don't know everything I want to know. I have so much more to learn."

"You have got to discover you, what you do, and trust it."

"Doubt can motivate you, so don't be afraid of it. Confidence and doubt are at two ends of the scale, and you need both. They balance each other out."

"I guess if you have an original take on life, or something about you is original, you don't have to study people who came before you. You don't have to mimic anybody. You just have a gut feeling inside, an instinct that tells you what's right for you, and you can't do it in any other way."

"I like simple things. Elastic waists, so I can eat."

"I wish I could be like Shaw who once read a bad review of one of his plays, called the critic and said: 'I have your review in front of me and soon it will be behind me.'"

"Oh God, don't envy me, I have my own pains."

"I've been called many names like perfectionist, difficult and obsessive. I think it takes obsession, takes searching for the details for any artist to be good."

"I just became a singer, because I could never get work as an actress."

"I'm a work in progress."

"The audience is the barometer of the truth."

"It always gave me the creeps when I saw performers who desperately wanted the audience to like them. That's not what I'm about."

"I find George Bush and Dick Cheney frightening, Donald Rumsfeld and John Ashcroft frightening."

"I was a personality before I became a person - I am simple, complex, generous, selfish, unattractive, beautiful, lazy and driven."

"What is exciting is not for one person to be stronger than the other... but for two people to have met their match and yet they are equally as stubborn, as obstinate, as passionate, as crazy as the other."

"We have a president who stole the presidency through family ties, arrogance and intimidation, employing Republican operatives to exercise the tactics of voter fraud by disenfranchising thousands of blacks, elderly Jews and other minorities."