"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."

"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."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"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."

"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."

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

"A human being can be good or bad or right or wrong, maybe. But how can you say a person is illegal? You just can't. That's all there is to it."

"Now I'm starting to think he wasn't supposed to be my whole life, he was just this doorway to me."

"I lost a child," she said, meeting Lusa's eyes directly. "I thought I wouldn't live through it. But you do. You learn to love the place somebody leaves behind for you."

"If you never stepped on anybody's toes, you never been for a walk."

"Silence has many advantages. When you do not speak, other people presume you to be deaf or feeble-minded and promptly make a show of their own limitations."

"No other continent has endured such an unspeakably bizarre combination of foreign thievery and foreign goodwill."

"How pointless life could be, what a foolish business of inventing things to love, just so you could dread losing them."

"To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know."

"Memories do not always soften with time; some grow edges like knives."

"Humans can be fairly ridiculous animals."

"Every betrayal contains a perfect moment, a coin stamped heads or tails with salvation on the other side."

"Your dreams, what you hope for and all that, it's not separate from your life. It grows right up out of it."

"But I've swallowed my pride before, that's for sure. I'm practically lined with my mistakes on the inside like a bad-wallpapered bathroom."