only kindness that raises its head from the crowd of the world to say it is I you have been looking for, and then goes with you everywhere like a shadow or a friend.

I love the solitude of reading. I love the deep dive into someone else's story, the delicious ache of a last page.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.

Poetry calls us to pause. There is so much we overlook, while the abundance around us continues to shimmer, on its own.

There is a place to stand where you can see so many lights you forget you are one of them.

... the real heroes of race and culture would always be the people who stepped out of their own line to make a larger circle.

You know, those of us who leave our homes in the morning and expect to find them there when we go back - it's hard for us to understand what the experience of a refugee might be like.

This is the world I want to live in. The shared world.

Being good felt like a heavy coat, so I took it off.

Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth.

Energy is everything. Rubbing happy and sad together creates energy.

Influence is when you are not the one talking and yet your words fill the room

It has thick skin, and all the most important thinkers have become part of it.

God answers prayer with certainty. Wish fulfillment is something else.

Government 'help' to business is just as disastrous as government persecution... the only way a government can be of service to national prosperity is by keeping its hands off.

Maybe miracles are given not to prove anything, but simply to remind us that the physical world is not so solid and real and dependable as we think.

And Thou, vast Ocean! on whose awful face Time’s iron feet can print no ruin-trace, By breezes lull’d, or by the storm-blasts driv’n, Thy majesty uplifts the mind to heaven.

Why resist change when it's the main source of your growth?

... the constructive power of an image is not measured in terms of its truth, but of the love it inspires.

I have no shortage of material or offers, it's just a case of what you select to do. But I think it's realistic that my chances of playing Romeo are now over.

I love my kids as individuals, not as a herd, and I do have a herd of children: I have seven kids.