In Indonesia, I had spent two years at a Muslim school, two years at a Catholic school. In the Muslim school, the teacher wrote to tell my mother that I made faces during Koranic studies.

You can’t let your failures define you. You have to let your failures teach you.

Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.

Keep exploring. Keep dreaming. Keep asking why. Don’t settle for what you already know. Never stop believing in the power of your ideas, your imagination, your hard work to change the world.

When ignorant folks want to advertise their ignorance, you don't really have to do anything, you just let them talk.

Just because we have the best hammer does not mean that every problem is a nail.

Change is never easy, but always possible.

Don’t ever let anybody tell you that your efforts don’t matter or that your voice doesn’t count. Don’t ever believe that you can’t make a difference. You have.

Where you are right now doesn't have to determine where you'll end up.

Learning to stand in somebody else's shoes, to see through their eyes, that's how peace begins. And it's up to you to make that happen. Empathy is a quality of character that can change the world.

If somebody is different from you, that's not something you criticize, that's something that you appreciate.

Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.

Where do you see conflict in this world? Only where there is infatuation (attachment).

Fences can be prisons, in a way. They're necessary for those incapable of learning restraint, but they diminish life.

She smiles, and her eyes look as if they can see back into her memory, into all the things that have gone into making a person what they are.

When I was willing to let go of what I wanted, I received what was truly mine. I’ve realized that the latter is always the greater gift.

She wondered if maybe tragedy was what it took to make your heart capable of admitting a new member.

I used to sit on the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue and wonder why the Senate was always going into recess, until in my first year I realized how intense the pressure was.

Journalists say my music is "blue wave," or "dreamy," or "jangly-slacker jewel," and none of it really makes sense to me.

Great Poets discover themselves. Little Poets have to be 'discovered' by somebody else.

I never outline. I don't work from an outline. I have no idea where the book is going. I mean, even two-thirds of the way through, I don't know how it's going to end.