“If I am not good to myself, how can I expect anyone else to be good to me?”

Love life. Engage in it. Give it all you’ve got. Love it with a passion because life truly does give back, many times over, what you put into it.

Stepping onto a brand-new path is difficult, but not more difficult than remaining in a situation, which is not nurturing to the whole woman.

When we give cheerfully and accept gratefully, everyone is blessed.

Hoping for the best, prepared for the worst, and unsurprised by anything in between.

I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better.

Making a decision to write was a lot like deciding to jump into a frozen lake.

You may shoot me with your words, you may cut me with your eyes, you may kill me with your hatefulness, but still, like air, I’ll rise!

Poetry puts starch in your backbone so you can stand, so you can compose your life.

Life is going to give you just what you put in it. Put your whole heart in everything you do, and pray, then you can wait.

It is this belief in a power larger than myself and other than myself which allows me to venture into the unknown and even the unknowable.

Living well is an art that can be developed: a love of life and ability to take great pleasure from small offerings and assurance that the world owes you nothing and that every gift is exactly that, a gift.

Everything in the universe has a rhythm, everything dances.

When someone shows you who they are believe them; the first time.

There’s a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure truth.

The need for change bulldozed a road down the center of my mind.

Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it.

Just when I discovered the meaning of life, they changed it.

The depths of the sea are only water after all.

There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love.

Talent comes from experience and failure.

No one is completely unhappy at the failure of his best friend.

Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it’s thinking of yourself less.

Every deep thinker is more afraid of being understood than of being misunderstood.

So you’re somebody now, but what’s somebody in a nobody town?