“Part of living your life is an awareness of the opportunities that can be missed and an awareness that time moves in one direction.”

Highs and lows make you feel that things matter, but they’re nothing.” “So what’s something?” “Being reliable is something. Being good.

There were things I wanted to tell him. But I knew they would hurt him. So I buried them, and let them hurt me.

We believed in our grandmother’s cooking more fervently than we believed in God.

Ninety-nine percent of all land animals eaten or used to produce milk and eggs in the United States are factory farmed. So although there are important exceptions, to speak about eating animals today is to speak about factory farming.

Art can be very political but that can’t be the purpose of art, it can’t be the driving force. It isn’t with any of the books that I love, anyway.

One day you will do things for me that you hate. That is what it means to be family.

Songs are as sad as the listener.

I’m so afraid of losing something I love that I refuse to love anything.

I am sure people tell you this constantly but if you looked up ‘incredibly beautiful’ in the dictionary there would be a picture of you.

A few weeks after the worst day, I started writing lots of letters. I don’t know why, but it was one of the only things that made my boots lighter.

It was one of the best days of my life, a day during which I lived my life and didn’t think about my life at all.

In my family, Father is the world champion at ending conversations.

I try not to remember the life that I didn’t want to lose but lost and have to remember,

The philosopher Elaine Scarry has observed that “beauty always takes place in the particular.” Cruelty, on the other hand, prefers abstraction.

The more you love someone, he came to think, the harder it is to tell them. It surprised him that strangers didn’t stop each other on the street to say I love you.

Being with him made my brain quiet. I didn’t have to invent a thing.

Being present means being completely aware of all that is. It means you’re not in denial, you’re not pretending, and you’re not avoiding.

We communicate all the time, even when we don’t realize it. Be aware of body language.

On any given day, in any given moment, something could happen that opens up for you an entirely new path. Be still, be alert, be ready.

Know that people are doing the best they can from their level of awareness. Accept people for who they are and always be ready to forgive.

Joy is being fully aware of reality.

My deepest awareness of myself is that I am deeply loved by Jesus Christ and I have done nothing to earn it or deserve it.

Owning your own feelings, rather than blaming them on someone else, is the mark of a person who has moved from contracted to expanded awareness.

I have two passions in my life. One is to raise the awareness of the internment of Japanese-American citizens. My other passion is the theater.