Quotes

The longer we listen to one another - with real attention - the more commonality we will find in all our lives. That is, if we are careful to exchange with one another life stories and not simply opinions.

The point is to change one's life. The point is not to give some vent to the emotions that have been destroying one; the point is so to act that one can master them now.

The secret of the truly successful, I believe, is that they learned very early in life how not to be busy. They saw through that adage, repeated to me so often in childhood, that anything worth doing is worth doing well.

We who officially value freedom of speech above life itself seem to have nothing to talk about but the weather.

When I was 17, I had an experience that I later learned could be called a 'mystical experience.' It was almost violent. No faces, voices, nothing like that. It is like the world burst and flamed into life all around me. That is not a great image, but it is as good as I will ever do.

I see my role as a scholar announcing that women's feelings of unworthiness and insecurity often may be traced to training in a male-oriented religion, and I'm trying to investigate a richer spiritual life for both sexes.

I've had an angel on my shoulder all my life.

I look back on my life like everybody does but not just career. I mean I look back on my life as a whole, so I don't think that I dwell there or anything and in terms of work I hope that there is a lot in front of me.

Always remember that better days are ahead - if not in this life, in the next.

Life is too large to hang out a sign: 'For Men Only.'

The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.

Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life.

To be hopeful, to embrace one possibility after another that is surely the basic instinct - crying out: High tide! Time to move out into the glorious debris. Time to take this life for what it is!

The important thing isn't the house. It's the ability to make it. You carry that in your brains and in your hands, wherever you go... It's one thing to carry your life wherever you go. Another thing to always go looking for it somewhere else.

Small change, small wonders - these are the currency of my endurance and ultimately of my life.

When you pick up a novel from the bed side table, you put down your own life at the same time and you become another person for the duration.

Being a novelist and being a mother have exactly coincided in my life: the call from my agent saying that I had a contract for my first novel - that was on my answering phone message when I got back from the hospital with my first child.

I'm living my life, not buying a lifestyle.

I believe that who we are, and consequently the work that we make, whether we're visual artists or writers or journalists or filmmakers, is a projection of where we were born, what's been withheld or lavished upon us, our color, our sex, our class. And everything we do in life to some degree is a reflection of that context.

I think that art is still a site for resistance and for the telling of various stories, for validating certain subjectivities we normally overlook. I'm trying to be affective, to suggest changes, and to resist what I feel are the tyrannies of social life on a certain level.

I try to deal with the complexities of power and social life, but as far as the visual presentation goes I purposely avoid a high degree of difficulty.

God has taken care of me, and mother dear has taken care of me, too. All my life.

I realize we're not promised tomorrow. Believe me, I realize that. But if God blesses me and lets me stay, I love my life so much, it is such a good life. I am eager to throw myself at His feet, but I don't want to get on the first busload that is going.

That's what I loved about show business, no two days were alike. It's an exciting life.

It's an exciting life. I don't know where God is leading us. I just know that He opens doors and He closes the doors, and it is always the best for us.