We will be in tune with our bodies only if we truly love and honor them. We can't be in good communication with the enemy.

Although it's not useful to drown in despair, it's also not useful to keep a 'positive attitude' when this means concealing or denying real emotions.

Those of us who are locked into ineffective expressions of anger suffer as deeply as those of us who dare not get angry at all.

We cannot make another person change his or her steps to an old dance, but if we change our own steps, the dance no longer can continue in the same predictable pattern.

Only through our connectedness to others can we really know and enhance the self. And only through working on the self can we begin to enhance our connectedness to others.

If we only listened with the same passion that we feel about being heard.

Anger is a tool for change when it challenges us to become more of an expert on the self and less of an expert on others.

An intimate relationship is one in which neither party silences, sacrifices, or betrays the self and each party expresses strength and vulnerability, weakness and competence in a balanced way.

Whole-hearted listening is the greatest spiritual gift you can give to the other person.

In long-term relationships ... we are called upon to navigate that delicate balance between separateness and connectedness ... we confront the challenge of sustaining both--without losing either.

If you want a recipe for relationship failure, just wait for the other person to change first.

I've only ever trusted my gut on everything. I don't trust my head, I don't trust my heart, I trust my gut.

Annette Bening should've won Oscar for American Beauty. I mean, I know Hilary Swank was there, she was so great too... Annette deserves one. She better win. I'm an Academy voter, and I voted for her.

A pacifist between wars is like a vegetarian between meals.

I feel better about blaming myself if there is some sort of mistake and that's why I'm not in a rush.

You have to be a little bad to make history.

One thing I will never do as long as I’m at Georgia is lose to Florida.

You cannot disown what is yours. Flung out, there is always the return, the reckoning, the revenge, perhaps the reconciliation. There is always the return.

President Obama is launching a new $6 billion space policy that will ultimately take astronauts to Mars. Of course, it's $6 billion and $45 if the astronauts have a carry-on.

So something had begun, and now she could not stop it. Twin threads ran through her: fear and excitement. She could leave this place today. She could start a new life somewhere else.

The emotional stakes a memoirist bets with could not be higher, and it's physically enervating. I nap on a daily basis like a cross-country trucker.