Life's impermanence, I realized, is what makes every single day so precious. It's what shapes our time here. It's what makes it so important than not a single moment be wasted.

My mother is extraordinary; she's a superwoman, like so many other single mothers who are out there.

We're not products of our environments, we're products of our expectations.

The young men in our city are not problems to be solved. They are opportunities to be unleashed.

When it is time for you to leave this school, leave your job, or even leave this earth, you make sure you have worked hard to make sure it mattered you were even here.

Potential is universal, opportunity is not.

The expectations that others place on us help us form our expectations of ourselves.

The choices we make about the lives we live determine the kinds of legacies we leave.

But really, where leadership is born and where leadership is really bred is.

The chilling truth is that his story could have been mine. The tragedy is that my story could have been his.

The importance of education plays a huge role.

Freedom is not from the outside. It's of the inside.

It's very hard to keep personal prejudice out of a thing like this. And no matter where you run into it, prejudice obscures the truth.

The senses deceive from time to time, and it is prudent never to trust wholly those who have deceived us even once.

Israel is guilty of apartheid and persecution of the Palestinian people, both inside Israel and also in the Occupied Territories.

The whole of life is symbolic because the whole of it has meaning.

What are you?" I whispered. He shrugged again. "Something," he said. "Something like you, something like a beast, something like a bird, something like an angel." He laughed. "Something like that.

Lord Rothschild had access to all manner of leaders and experts. He was responsible only to the Prime Minister and answerable to neither the electorate nor the civil service chiefs.

You come to a point where you give up on holding yourself to a perfect feminist ideal — it just feels stifling.

No literary form is more revealing, more spontaneous or more individual than a letter.

With a book tucked in one hand, and a computer shoved under my elbow, I will march, not sidle, shudder or quake, into the twenty-first century.