“I was fifteen years old when I understood how it is that things break down: people can’t imagine someone else’s point of view.”

Experience has taught me that you cannot value dreams according to the odds of their coming true. Their real value is in stirring within us the will to aspire.

Until we reach equality in education, we can’t reach equality in the larger society.

When everyone at school is speaking one language, and a lot of your classmates’ parents also speak it, and you go home and see that your community is different -there is a sense of shame attached to that. It really takes growing up to treasure the specialness of being different.

There are no bystanders in this life.

I am an ordinary person who has been blessed with extraordinary opportunities and experiences. Today is one of those experiences.

Personal experiences affect the facts that judges choose to see.

Don’t be shy about making a teacher of any willing party who knows what he or she is doing.

Pretending to be a princess is fun, but it is definitely not a career.

I do know one thing about me: I don’t measure myself by others’ expectations or let others define my worth.

Remember that no one succeeds alone. Never walk alone in your future paths.

You can’t dream unless you know what the possibilities are.

If your child marches to a different beat, a different drummer, you might just have to go along with that music. Help them achieve what’s important to them.

It really takes growing up to treasure the specialness of being different.

If I write a book where all I’ve ever experienced is success, people won’t take a positive lesson from it. In being candid, I have to own up to my own failures, both in my marriage and in my work environment.

Some people choose not to engage the battle and then don’t seek out that kind of success. And others do.

A role model in the flesh provides more than inspiration; his or her very existence is confirmation of possibilities one may have every reason to doubt, saying, “Yes, someone like me can do this.”

Why the increasing emphasis by professional age experts and the media on – and public acceptance of – the nursing home as the locus of age when, in fact, more than ninety percent of those over sixty-five continue to live in the community?

I’m my age and I feel glorious.

Aging will create the music of the coming century.

Where children are, there is the golden age.

Seek to learn constantly while you live; do not wait in the faith that old age by itself will bring wisdom.

Anything incomprehensible has a sexual significance to many people under thirty-five.

Life after 50 or 60 is itself another country, as different as adolescence is from childhood, or as adulthood is from adolescence – and just as adventurous.

But somewhere within each of us, buried at varying depths depending on the age and degree of neglect or abuse, shame or coercion we endured, there is a resistant, daydreaming, rebellious, creative, unique child — a true self who is waiting.