“Dominance, even the threat of it, is a form of dehumanization. It’s the ugliest kind of power.”

The choice, as he saw it, was this: You give up or you work for change. What’s better for us? Barack called to the people gathered in the room. Do we settle for the world as it is, or do we work for the world as it should be?

You don’t really know how attached you are until you move away, until you’ve experienced what it means to be dislodged, a cork floating on the ocean of another place.

Time, as far as my father was concerned, was a gift you gave to other people.

I began to understand that his version of hope reached far beyond mine: It was one thing to get yourself out of a stuck place, I realized. It was another thing entirely to try and get the place itself unstuck.

It hurts to live after someone has died. It just does.

His money went largely toward books, which to him were like sacred objects, providing ballast for his mind.

We were planting seeds of change, the fruit of which we might never see. We had to be patient.

It’s easier to hold onto your own stereotypes and misconceptions, it makes you feel justified in your own ignorance. That’s America. So the challenge for us is, are we ready for change?

For me, marriage was more like a full-on merger, a reconfiguring of two lives into one, with the well-being of a family taking precedence over any one agenda or goal.

there’s no straight line between effort and reward.

You find ways to adapt. If you’re in it forever, there’s really no choice.

No one, I realized, was going to look out for me unless I pushed for it.

My daughters are the heart of my heart and the center of my world.

Failure is a feeling long before it becomes an actual result

Fulfillment, I’m sure, struck her as a rich person’s conceit.

As a kid, you learn to measure long before you understand the size or value of anything. Eventually, if you’re lucky, you learn that you’ve been measuring all wrong.

I think that’s become passe, but if you can surround yourself with a kind of monument to yourself and your family – a statement – and you can afford it, then that’s a noble project.

I mean, the sound of an amplified guitar in a room full of people was so hypnotic and addictive to me, that I could cross any kind of border to get on there.

I had never really dated. I’ve always been a relationship kind of person.

It makes me feel kind of weird, but obviously the Man Upstairs gave me something and it touches people, and I’m just so blessed.

I’m blessed with a good pair of ears. That’s how I fooled my piano teacher. I’d watch his fingers and I’d listen to it, and I just kind of basically learned it by myself.

If you want to condemn yourself for the mistakes you’ve made, let’s be fair, that means you’ve got to congratulate yourself for all the good things you’ve done. It’s okay to say, “God, I wish I’d done this; yeah, but I did do that.” Then it kind of balances out.

I am a man and all that affects mankind concerns me.

You can kind of judge how old a film is by the size of the cell phones.