Grief changes shape, but it never ends.

My favorite thing in life is writing about life, specifically the parts of life concerning love. Because, as far as I’m concerned, love is absolutely everything.

It’s fun to be hopelessly in love. It’s dangerous, but it’s fun.

I have found the best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want and then advise them to do it.

I’m drawn to bad romances.

What’s really hard is that you could care a lot for someone and not want to live with him anymore.

I like the way the stories of my relationships sound to music more than the way they look in print, in gossip columns or in me talking about them in interviews. I think it’s a better way of telling the stories.

I don’t hate women – they just sometimes make me mad.

The reason that I’m here at all is because of my relationship with my family and their encouragement of me to be a musician and to work hard. As long as I stay there in that space, I can do anything. That’s my truth.

There is no lonelier man in death, except the suicide, than that man who has lived many years with a good wife and then outlived her. If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it.

Ours is a nation of laws: of citizens who live under them and for the citizens who enforce them. So, to a community in Ferguson that is rightly hurting and looking for answers, let me call once again for us to seek some understanding rather than simply holler at each other. Let’s seek to heal rather than to wound each other.

It is usually the imagination that is wounded first, rather than the heart; it being much more sensitive.

The greatest service that can be offered to children who show personality traits or inclinations that might not be understood by the adults around them is to allow them to express their own unique humanity.

Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.

I think love is one of the purest things you can sing about. One of the best things you can sing about.

When we give ourselves the chance to let go of all our tension, the body’s natural capacity to heal itself can begin to work.

Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.

What do I care about the purring of one who cannot love, like the cat?

For me, already being part of a single parent household and knowing it was just me and my mom, you’d would wake up times and hope that the next day you’d be able to be alongside your mother because she was out trying to make sure that I was taken care of. But all I cared about was her being home.

I support immediate financial assistance to the newly elected Palestinian president. Now, I don’t know what those numbers will be, and I don’t know how it’s going to be framed.

I feel, as a songwriter, it’s one of the hardest things to do – to sit down and say how you feel.

I dote on his very absence.

The degree of one’s emotions varies inversely with one’s knowledge of the facts.

I don’t try and be dark, but there are obviously darker emotions that I want to capture sometimes.

In the egoic state, your sense of self, your identity, is derived from your thinking mind – in other words, what your mind tells you about yourself: the storyline of you, the memories, the expectations, all the thoughts that go through your head continuously and the emotions that reflect those thoughts. All those things make up your sense of self.

It is better to lead from behind and to put others in front, especially when you celebrate victory when nice things occur. You take the front line when there is danger. Then people will appreciate your leadership.

I really believed that fear is contagious.

The first magic of love is our ignorance that it can ever end.

In time we hate that which we often fear.

I found that with depression, one of the most important things you could realise is that you’re not alone.

I was in my late thirties when my eyes were opened to truth in God’s Word that showed me I wasn’t living the abundant life Jesus died for me to have. I had a very negative mindset and was miserable most of the time because of the abuse I had experienced throughout my childhood.

A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.

You have to give others the opportunity to love who you love. If they don’t accept it, it’s their loss.

I think in defeat you grope for things that are happy, and it’s hard.

Shared joys make a friend, not shared sufferings.

The loss of a child is my greatest nightmare.

I’m very disappointed in Obama. I was very much in support of him in the beginning, but I cannot support war. I cannot support droning. I cannot support capitulating to the banks.

But O, how bitter a thing it is to look into happiness through another man’s eyes.

I don’t dislike any of my exes. If I took time to form a relationship, it’s gonna hurt when we move on, but are you puttin‘ White-Out over all that beautiful time together? That was real time in your life. It’s connected to where you are today.

He didn’t come out of my belly, but my God, I’ve made his bones, because I’ve attended to every meal, and how he sleeps, and the fact that he swims like a fish because I took him to the ocean. I’m so proud of all those things. But he is my biggest pride.

We of the sinking middle class may sink without further struggles into the working class where we belong, and probably when we get there it will not be so dreadful as we feared, for, after all, we have nothing to lose.

Irrespective of age, we mourn for those loved and lost. Mourning is one of the deepest expressions of pure love.

Having a child, that’s always been my biggest fear. I want a child and I fear a child.

Africa is a continent in flames. And deep down, if we really accepted that Africans were equal to us, we would all do more to put the fire out. We’re standing around with watering cans, when what we really need is the fire brigade.

Acting is happy agony.

It’s one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself, to forgive. Forgive everybody.

Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.

Let us touch the dying, the poor, the lonely and the unwanted according to the graces we have received and let us not be ashamed or slow to do the humble work.

The problem isn’t that Johnny can’t read. The problem isn’t even that Johnny can’t think. The problem is that Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling.

There is a thin line that separates laughter and pain, comedy and tragedy, humor and hurt.

We are more often frightened than hurt; and we suffer more from imagination than from reality.

The outpouring of support from millions of people in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti has been impressive.

I think writing really helps you heal yourself. I think if you write long enough, you will be a healthy person. That is, if you write what you need to write, as opposed to what will make money, or what will make fame.

Men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact.

Isn’t it funny how babies laugh a lot? I read a toddler, a young child laughs 300 times a day. The average adult laughs, like, four times a day. God put it in them. He put the laugh in us, but I think sometimes we let life get us down, you know, have bad breaks, and we lose our breaks.

No one wants advice – only corroboration.

One is never afraid of the unknown; one is afraid of the known coming to an end.

The best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want and then advise them to do it.

Still and all, why bother? Here’s my answer. Many people need desperately to receive this message: I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.

It occurred to me that at one point it was like I had two diseases – one was Alzheimer’s, and the other was knowing I had Alzheimer’s.

I went through every emotion with tryna pursue what I’m doing, you know what I mean? And I think what’s gon‘ separate whoever’s gon go for something, that you ain’t gon‘ quit.