“Nothing is all good or all bad, nothing is black or white, everything is just messy and human and difficult.”

I have to meditate before I go to bed, always. I have to let the day go and let the eternal in.

I have to welcome the pain like I welcome the joy.

Love is a true unconditional space to me. To love someone or to be loved is to be seen, and I think, gosh, as humans, all we want is to be seen, to be heard, right? To be valued. To be respected. But mostly just to be held in a safe, unconditional space.

I think true beauty is everywhere. Be it. See it. Notice it. Love it. Be grateful for it. Marvel at it. It’s everywhere. It’s all around us all the time.

It’s a lot of fun to just say to people, proudly, ‘I get to play the First Lady.’ It’s just fun to say.

Absolutely undermining my confidence in every moment. Bad tape in my head all the time.

My dad used to say, ‘Just be yourself and you’ll be fine,’ but it’s really, really true.

I used to be so hard on myself. So hard on myself. Just my own worst critic to the nth degree.

The more I resist anything, the stronger it gets.

I feel it is a blessing, a duty, an honor, that we give the love that we have, and we share the lives that we have with our fullest heart.

There’s a lot of life on the planet that needs love, wants love, deserves love, in whatever capacity we are able.

I miss singing. I did Broadway forever.

I think you choose how you walk through this life. I think if you choose to participate in a paradigm that is looks-based, if you’re an actor, then it can be empowering in some ways, and it can be really limiting in some ways in terms of time and longevity.

If I’m feeling hurt, sad, lonely, depressed, and then I shame myself for feeling that, then that’s a black hole for me. I really have worked a lot to meet pain with both gratitude and gentleness.

I get a lot of work done in my dreams and I don’t want to take anybody else’s work with me.

That is what thrills me, personally. Small acts of kindness; thoughtful, large acts of kindness. I feel like we’re in a bit of a precipice, and I think that any beautiful energy on the kindness continuum will just help us fall into a lovelier place.

White people don’t sing together very often, and when they do, it’s about the celebrity of the song. The singing at my shows is all about harmony.

Congress is a middle-aged, middle-class, white male power structure … no wonder it’s been so totally unresponsive to the needs of this country.

If there is one thing in this wonderful world of ours that is worth preserving, defending, and promoting, it is the White Race.

Three publishers came to me at the White House after George lost and said, ‘We would like to publish your book.’ I said, ‘Well, I don’t have a book,’ and they said well it’s a well known fact that you have kept diaries.

Science has authority not because of white coats or titles, but because of precision and transparency: you explain your theory, set out your evidence, and reference the studies that support your case.

I have felt terribly from the beginning when I saw the problems and recognized that they would be ongoing. We were hired to put back the contours of the greens as closely as possible to George Thomas’s designs and were real proud of what we did. It’s a sad situation now.

Our too-young and too-new America, lusty because it is lonely, aggressive because it is afraid, insists upon seeing the world in terms of good and bad.

Many facets on the stone. Nooks and crannies in abundance. Things are usually not either black or white, but multicolored.