You have people come into your life shockingly and surprisingly. You have losses that you never thought you’d experience. You have rejection and you have learn how to deal with that and how to get up the next day and go on with it.

What is necessary to change a person is to change his awareness of himself.

I lived a sloppy life. So I took very small increments in my life. I started making my bed. I started cleaning my room. There were dishes in the sink. It started off with doing small house chores. I saw that the yard needed to be mowed. So instead of being told it needed to be mowed, I would mow it.

A divorce is like an amputation: you survive it, but there’s less of you.

He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.

We work to become, not to acquire.

You must take personal responsibility. You cannot change the circumstances, the seasons, or the wind, but you can change yourself. That is something you have charge of.

I’ve just tried to grow up in the most natural and gradual process that I possibly can and make choices I feel are right for me and my fans.

All the adversity I’ve had in my life, all my troubles and obstacles, have strengthened me… You may not realize it when it happens, but a kick in the teeth may be the best thing in the world for you.

In college, a loss is pretty devastating. That feeling kind of goes away in an 82-game season. You hate to lose, but you also have a lot more games to make up for it.

Have you ever asked yourselves what you are going to do when you grow up? In all likelihood you will get married, and before you know where you are, you will be mothers and fathers; and you will then be tied to a job, or to the kitchen, in which you will gradually wither away. Is that all that your life is going to be?

Don’t feel sorry for me.

I’ve always felt that if I examine myself too much, I’ll find out what I know and don’t know, and I’ll burst the bubble. I’ve gotten so lucky relying on my animal instincts, I’d rather keep a little bit of the animal alive.

A man who is not afraid is not aggressive, a man who has no sense of fear of any kind is really a free, a peaceful man.

I think I have to trust that you end up with the person you’re supposed to end up with, and that everything in between is there to teach you stuff.

What you are, you are by accident of birth; what I am, I am by myself. There are and will be a thousand princes; there is only one Beethoven.

When you are younger, you want to do everything, and you go haywire.

If my world were to cave in tomorrow, I would look back on all the pleasures, excitements and worthwhilenesses I have been lucky enough to have had. Not the sadness, not my miscarriages or my father leaving home, but the joy of everything else. It will have been enough.

At 155, I will be the same animal, an even better animal.

Why is it so hard for people to believe that white people are poor?! I wouldn’t say I lived in a ghetto; I’d say I lived in the ‚hood. The same friends I had back then are the same people on tour with me now.

Love always ends differently and it always begins differently – especially with me.

A mother takes twenty years to make a man of her boy, and another woman makes a fool of him in twenty minutes.

It was high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, ‚always do what you are afraid to do.‘

We cannot teach people anything; we can only help them discover it within themselves.

Memories are the key not to the past, but to the future.

My main goal is to be a self-made man and have control over what’s mine.

I’m afraid that people who know me as I usually am will discover I have another side, a better and finer side. I’m afraid they’ll mock me, think I’m ridiculous and sentimental and not take me seriously. I’m used to not being taken seriously, but only the ‚light-hearted‘ Anne is used to it and can put up with it; the ‚deeper‘ Anne is too weak.

Let the people on both sides keep their self-possession, and just as other clouds have cleared away in due time, so will this, and this great nation shall continue to prosper as before.

I like criticism. It makes you strong.

People who truly understand what is meant by self-reliance know they must live their lives by ethics rather than rules.

Be happy with being you. Love your flaws. Own your quirks. And know that you are just as perfect as anyone else, exactly as you are.

My father was a mean, controlling and manipulative person for most of his life. He was unpredictable and unstable.

I made bad decisions. I’m not denying that I made bad decisions.

Ordinary readers, forgive my paradoxes: one must make them when one reflects; and whatever you may say, I prefer being a man with paradoxes than a man with prejudices.

The self is hateful.

When I write about a 15-year old, I jump, I return to the days when I was that age. It’s like a time machine. I can remember everything. I can feel the wind. I can smell the air. Very actually. Very vividly.

People are looking for something a little more stable; people are feeling like they need to get closer to God.

Students achieving Oneness will move on to Twoness.

It creeps me out sometimes to think of the person I was. I was a terrible person. I was mean to people.

There’s two sorts of fear: one you embrace and one you should listen to and turn the other way.

Now, you lose something in your life, or you come into a conflict, and there’s gonna come a time that you’re gonna know: There was a reason for that. And at the end of your life, all the things you thought were periods, they turn out to be commas. There was never a full stop in any of it.

A cat is only itself, representative of the strong forces of life that won’t let go.

Once we accept our limits, we go beyond them.

The highest result of education is tolerance.

We will be more successful in all our endeavors if we can let go of the habit of running all the time, and take little pauses to relax and re-center ourselves. And we’ll also have a lot more joy in living.

In retrospect, I can see I couldn’t talk to people face to face, so I got on stage and started screaming and squealing and twitching about. Ha! Like, that sure made sense!

I don’t think I’m such an amazing person who needs to be written about.

I deeply regret any harm, or any perceived harm, that I may have done to anyone by any behaviour of mine.

I have never felt that the one thing that I am ‚known for‘ is what I am.

I always thought it was wrong for me to take credit for the work that I did. I don’t think that anymore.

Every great person is always being helped by everybody; for their gift is to get good out of all things and all persons.

You must live for another if you wish to live for yourself.

If a person doesn’t change, there’s something really wrong with him.

The vegetable life does not content itself with casting from the flower or the tree a single seed, but it fills the air and earth with a prodigality of seeds, that, if thousands perish, thousands may plant themselves, that hundreds may come up, that tens may live to maturity; that, at least one may replace the parent.

Even with all the advantages of retrospect, and a lot of witnesses dead and gone, you can’t make your life look as if you intended it or you were consistent. All you can show is how you dealt with various hands.

At one time, I was very angry. I even treated fashion like a kind of crusade: you were either with us or against us, that kind of feeling. Now I know we need ideas, not kicking down a door.

I used to worry about every little thing, trying to figure out every problem. Well, I realize now how foolish that was. I was no more in control of my life than the man on the moon.

When it all got taken away, I was becoming a young man. So I had to sacrifice to leave my family… Sleeping in my car, getting an apartment for a month and getting evicted the next month. Staying in the $25, $50 hotels.

Life is just one damned thing after another.

Fear? If I have gained anything by damning myself, it is that I no longer have anything to fear.

‚Suffering should not make us bitter people,‘ my mother once said, ‚it should make us better comforters.‘ Young people need to hear this from those who have walked before them, because someday they’ll be walking those same steps, but there may not be anyone following behind.