Dissecting a book was the same as making sense of life. You have to find a way to interpret life, or you'll go nuts.

When you only do what is expected of you, you never learn what you would've done had you chosen for yourself.

The past hadn't been erased just because a new future had been handed it.

I don't know very many people who can piece together eloquent prayers when their souls are wounded. Words don't come at those times, but tears do. I have always thought of my tears as prayers.

We are born knowing how to be just. And we die knowing we spent a lifetime pretending we didn't.

No one thinks much about their ability to breathe; they just do it. It's when a person can't breathe, that they suddenly realize they'd been doing something truly marvelous all along.

We moved wordlessly from one room to another, from the room of the dead to the room where time lay in pages everywhere I looked.

When we trust someone, we believe what they tell us is true. We experience it as being true. It's not the experience itself that empowers us to believe it. It is the trust.

Confidence tends to minimize the magnitude of the choice.

Our flaws are obvious, yet we are loved and able to love, if we choose, because there is that bit of the divine still smoldering in us.

You shouldn't imagine things that you haven't a shred of proof happened.

How may I hate that which I love with such intensity of passion? How should I abhor that for which my every drop of blood is boiling?

And I know an eighteenth charm, and that charm is the greatest of all, and that charm I can tell no man, for a secret that no one knows but you is the most powerful secret there can ever be.

For many young women, the dream of independence and a home of their own is a tantalising goal, while a lifetime devoted solely to catering for another person's needs would be hard to countenance.

The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor.

I'm in the booth and first of all, I'm from Germany and I had never heard a gospel in my life.

Music is the very cement that has not just held the black community together but holds black selves together in a fundamental sense.

I won an Academy Award for 'The Cider House Rules,' playing an American.

I think women hide behind their hair.

I wonder if the reason I tend to say yes to everything is because I deeply believe that I can survive anything.

When it comes to fund managers and market strategists, this year's hero usually turns into next year's zero.