Military life is hard, even cruel—especially for the kids.

I’m clinging to one last thought: pain is the harbinger of hope. You have to be alive to feel pain. If you are alive, then you have purpose. If you have purpose, then you have hope.

In total this journey will take five flights and fifty-five hours, but in reality it began four decades and two generations ago when my uncle died in Vietnam.

I felt so much pride, so much love. You get a handful of days like this in a lifetime. Take in every minute. They’ll be over soon enough, and you never know what tomorrow will bring.

A son for a flag is a lot of sacrifice.

The meeting began well, meaning it had the potential for being short.

I felt like I should salute. If only I knew how.

We all lose people. We all have to live in the aftermath. It’s how we move forward that counts, but sometimes we are tethered to something in our past that won’t let us move forward.

This is who I was, before I was dead. When I cared, when I was relentless.

We could never go back to how things were on the day before 9/11, but maybe I could go back to who I was.

I stood with my mom in the cemetery. She felt terrible pain. My grandmother is with God. My mom has to continue living. It’s not so easy, moving forward.

No one had ever given me any idea on how to handle it when the right one came along, but you weren't the right one for him.

She offered her love to flawed broken souls and in that we found freedom.

Grammar is politics by other means.

For me music is a vehicle to bring our pain to the surface, getting it back to that humble and tender spot where, with luck, it can lose its anger and become compassion again.

The newspaper is a marvelous medium. It is extraordinarily convenient and cheap. Let's see. This one cost 75 cents. Now that's a little high. I bought it when I was downtown this morning.

I had enjoyed life in Paris, and, taking all things into consideration, enjoyed it wholesomely.

I don't view interviewing as much of a performance. My whole life is in essence a performance but singing and dancing for television is an entirely different thing.

My dad worked - f - k if I know - seven jobs? He painted a house. He would deliver toilets. He drove a cab, delivered pizzas. Whatever he could do, he did.

There is scarcely anything that drags a person down like debt.

Conventional wisdom is no wisdom at all. Conventional wisdom is taking somebody else's word for the way things are It's the followers of this world who rely on assumption. Not the leaders.