What is normal? Normal was yesterday. If you lose a leg, one day you’re hopping around on one leg, so you know the difference.

Life is a series of experiences, each one of which makes us bigger, even though sometimes it is hard to realize this. For the world was built to develop character, and we must learn that the setbacks and grieves which we endure help us in our marching onward.

When I was 8 years old I became a mute and was a mute until I was 13, and I thought of my whole body as an ear, so I can go into a crowd and sit still and absorb all sound. That talent or ability has lasted and served me until today.

The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes. Unless a particular man made New Year resolutions, he would make no resolutions. Unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective.

We should feel sorrow, but not sink under its oppression.

I was kind of secretly hoping one of my kids would go out and make a million bucks. So when they put me in a home, at least I’ll have a window with a view.

All the reasonings of men are not worth one sentiment of women.

Failure means a stripping away of the inessential.

If you leave the smallest corner of your head vacant for a moment, other people’s opinions will rush in from all quarters.

Anyone can have a good day, but you have to be able to perform on a bad day.

I was always very curious as a young man about why older writers who I met seemed so indifferent to what was going on, whereas I, in my 20s, was reading everything. Everything seemed important. But they were only interested in the writers they admired when they were young, and I didn’t understand it then, but now, now I understand it.

Mortality is very different when you’re 20 to when you’re 50.

What you see, but can’t see over is as good as infinite.

I feel real good because it’s about representing the young world and how to uplift each other and how to push us to be greater and make sure we don’t fall or get trapped or get in trouble, you know what I mean. Stay focused, you know what I mean.

Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes, playing a poor hand well.

This soul, or life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us. If one has the courage to ask her what she thinks, she is always saying the very opposite to what other people say.

The path we have chosen for the present is full of hazards, as all paths are. The cost of freedom is always high, but Americans have always paid it. And one path we shall never choose, and that is the path of surrender, or submission.

Wars of nations are fought to change maps. But wars of poverty are fought to map change.

Hold on with a bulldog grip, and chew and choke as much as possible.

I think the word rich is all relative.

It’s so much easier to pray for a bore than to go and see one.

Advice in old age is foolish; for what can be more absurd than to increase our provisions for the road the nearer we approach to our journey’s end.

You’re not a product of your nature. That is your genetic makeup or your nurture, the things that have happened to you. Of course those things affect you powerfully, but they do not determine you.

If I should ever be captured, I want no negotiation – and if I should request a negotiation from captivity they should consider that a sign of duress.

It’s a lot easier to stay idealistic if you don’t sign two to five next-of-kin letters every day.

The happiness of this life depends less on what befalls you than the way in which you take it.

I don’t see that my majority opinions are going to be undone.

Nobody can hurt me without my permission.

You can tell the tree by the fruit it bears. You see it through what the organization is delivering as far as a concrete program. If the tree’s fruit sours or grows brackish, then the time has come to chop it down – bury it and walk over it and plant new seeds.

I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I find myself.

It is any day better to stand erect with a broken and bandaged head then to crawl on one’s belly, in order to be able to save one’s head.

Be not the first by whom the new are tried, Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.

I’ve had a lot of success; I’ve had failures, so I learn from the failure.

Sometimes you have to take two steps back to take ten forward.

Many people find the universe confusing – it’s not.

Man does not live by soap alone; and hygiene, or even health, is not much good unless you can take a healthy view of it or, better still, feel a healthy indifference to it.

The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty, and all forms of human life.

I know how fiction matters to me, because if I want to express myself, I have to make up a story. Some people call it imagination. To me, it’s not imagination. It’s just a way of watching.

Any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

You can’t have it all all at once. Over my lifespan, I think I have had it all, but in given periods in time, things were rough. And if you have a caring life partner, you help the other person when that person needs it.

Serious illness doesn’t bother me for long because I am too inhospitable a host.

When you are young, you cannot imagine being disabled. You imagine you would conquer it somehow. As I’ve got older, I can imagine it; I can see how life narrows in. I feel compassion for my mother now.

How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct.

The young think that failure is the Siberian end of the line, banishment from all the living, and tend to do what I then did – which was to hide.

I was born with a happy heart, and I try to keep a good attitude. It’s not true that I’m happy all the time because nobody is, and we all go through our things.

What we need to do is always lean into the future; when the world changes around you and when it changes against you – what used to be a tail wind is now a head wind – you have to lean into that and figure out what to do because complaining isn’t a strategy.

Like a pianist runs her fingers over the keys, I’ll search my mind for what to say. Now, the poem may want you to write it. And then sometimes you see a situation and think, ‚I’d like to write about that.‘ Those are two different ways of being approached by a poem, or approaching a poem.

Little things affect little minds.

Everybody believes in something and everybody, by virtue of the fact that they believe in something, uses that something to support their own existence.

I am desperate for change – now – not in 8 years or 12 years, but right now.

Some people say that I should study to become a climate scientist so that I can ‚solve the climate crisis.‘ But the climate crisis has already been solved. We already have all the facts and solutions. All we have to do is to wake up and change.

Don’t be afraid to see what you see.

Revolutions go not backward.

We are ready for any unforeseen event that may or may not occur.

Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.

When one door is closed, don’t you know, another is open.

I see the world in black and white, and I don’t like compromising.

I think the worst part about a breakup sometimes, if one could choose a worst part, would possibly be if you get out of a relationship, and you don’t recognize yourself because you changed a lot about you.

In the struggle between yourself and the world second the world.

If God treats you well by teaching you a disastrous lesson, you never forget it.

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.