Any other woman who has to go to work and pick up the kids and make dinner – that’s way harder than what I have to do.

And obviously, from our own personal point of view, the principal challenge is a personal challenge.

Only God Himself fully appreciates the influence of a Christian mother in the molding of character in her children.

There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it’s like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.

As for accomplishments, I just did what I had to do as things came along.

I’ve never been a hands-on dad. I’m not ashamed to admit it, but you can’t run a restaurant and be home for tea at 4:30 and bath and change nappies.

I didn’t want to play it boring and safe. I also didn’t want to innovate too much. Second albums, man, they’re even scarier than first ones.

Clinicians, academicians, and politicians are often put to a test of faith. In pursuit of their goals, will their religion show or will it be hidden? Are they tied back to God or to man?

We thought we were running away from the grownups, and now we are the grownups.

To survive it is often necessary to fight and to fight you have to dirty yourself.

Only by contending with challenges that seem to be beyond your strength to handle at the moment you can grow more surely toward the stars.

In England, when an athlete gets to the top, we do our best to destroy him.

I train and I go home, and when I’m home, I think about training. That’s my life every day, and that’s it.

There is no easy walk to freedom anywhere, and many of us will have to pass through the valley of the shadow of death again and again before we reach the mountaintop of our desires.

I was a housewife, so I learned to write in times off, and I don’t think I ever gave it up, though there were times when I was very discouraged because I began to see that the stories I was writing were not very good, that I had a lot to learn, and that it was a much, much harder job than I had expected.

My interest in life comes from setting myself huge, apparently unachievable challenges and trying to rise above them.

Each year has been so robust with problems and successes and learning experiences and human experienes that a year is a lifetime at Apple. So this has been ten lifetimes.

I make preparations both to live and to die every day, but with the emphasis on not dying, and on acting as if I was going to carry on living.

Science never solves a problem without creating ten more.

When I wake up, I expect things to be good. If they’re not, then I try to set about trying to make them as good as I can ‚cause I know I’m gonna have to live that day anyway. So why not try to make the most of it if you can? Some days, they pan out a little better than others, but you still gotta always just try.

The uncertainty of parenting can bring up feelings in us that range from frustration to terror.

A good day is one where I can not just read a book, but write a review of it. Maybe today I’ll be able to do that. I get for some reason somewhat stronger when the sun starts to go down. Dusk is a good time for me. I’m crepuscular.

I’m an early riser. I get up between five and six, have coffee, and read for a couple of hours before everyone else gets up.

I had this child, and it destroyed my family.

The finest steel has to go through the hottest fire.

Contemplation of life after retirement and life after death can help you deal with contemporary challenges.

Hardly any human being is capable of pursuing two professions or two arts rightly.

The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.

I feel 80% of my life is completely normal.

My mother fought cancer for almost a decade and died at 56. She held out long enough to meet the first of her grandchildren and to hold them in her arms. But my other children will never have the chance to know her and experience how loving and gracious she was.

Many shoulder heavy burdens of righteous responsibility which, on occasion, seem so difficult to bear. I have heard those challenges termed impossible.

I was asked to act when I couldn’t act. I was asked to sing ‚Funny Face‘ when I couldn’t sing, and dance with Fred Astaire when I couldn’t dance – and do all kinds of things I wasn’t prepared for. Then I tried like mad to cope with it.

I have been up against tough competition all my life. I wouldn’t know how to get along without it.

I’m not sure how I’d survive without English Breakfast tea. Even in the Caribbean, I must drink 20 cups a day.

The 14th Amendment was recognized right away to be problematic. The concept of person was both too narrow and too broad, and the courts went to work to overcome both of those flaws.

You see, at the end of the day, my most important title is still ‚mom-in-chief.‘ My daughters are still the heart of my heart and the center of my world.

It’s lack of faith that makes people afraid of meeting challenges, and I believed in myself.

I believe in singing to such an extent that, if I were asked to redesign the British educational system, I would start by insisting that group singing becomes a central part of the daily routine. I believe it builds character and, more than anything else, encourages a taste for cooperation with others.

When you have two busy kids running around the house, returning e-mails is a task, let alone surfing the web.

I guess the toughest things in translations are word play, which can never be reproduced exactly.

Each success only buys an admission ticket to a more difficult problem.

It’s kind of like a challenge to myself to be able to hear somebody else’s hook and kind of interpret the words. Because my own hooks, I already know what I mean when I write them.

You learn to know a pilot in a storm.

A bachelor’s life is a fine breakfast, a flat lunch, and a miserable dinner.

When people are taken out of their depths they lose their heads, no matter how charming a bluff they may put up.

I tweet in the morning and the evening. To write 12 hours a day, there is a moment when you’re really tired. It’s my relaxing time.

I grew up as this very carefree, happy kid then things turned darker for me. Maybe it was because I saw that the world wasn’t as happy a place as I had hoped it would be for me.

If your mom cries a lot, you probably cry a lot. It’s what you learn.

Players who are not from the U.K. have to get used to the winds. I have to adapt my style as a result as well. Often, you are forced to keep things simple.

Every day is a major balancing act that I have to figure out and coordinate.

You’ll never find a better sparring partner than adversity.

Each generation faces different issues and challenges, but our standard must always be measured by God’s word.

At Columbia Law School, my professor of constitutional law and federal courts, Gerald Gunther, was determined to place me in a federal court clerkship, despite what was then viewed as a grave impediment: On graduation, I was the mother of a 4-year-old child.

It sure is hell to be president.

There are a number of things wrong with Washington. One of them is that everyone is too far from home.

The main problem with writing in verse is, if your fourth line doesn’t come out right, you’ve got to throw four lines away and figure out a whole new way to attack the problem. So the mortality rate is terrific.

I think, at a child’s birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift should be curiosity.

Even the securest financial plan and the finest health coverage aren’t enough to hold us steady when the challenges come… We need something more, something deeper and unshakeable, something that will see us through life’s hard times.

Who in their infinite wisdom decreed that Little League uniforms be white? Certainly not a mother.

It doesn’t matter if the water is cold or warm if you’re going to have to wade through it anyway.

When you tell a recruiter that you’re almost 300 pounds and you want to be a SEAL, it doesn’t go too well. I got hung up on a lot.