“I’m a liberal when it comes to human rights, the poor; so’s George Bush. . . . But Liberal and Conservative don’t mean much to me anymore. Does that mean we care about people and are interested and want to help? And if that makes you a Liberal, so be it.”

I don’t think that’s healthy for the country when anyone thinks their morals are better than anyone else’s.

You can’t tell a 6-year-old your sister is going to die.

If you are the wife of a governor or the wife of a vice president, I think you can be prepared for it.

I hate the fact that people think compromise is a dirty word.

I’m not a competitive person, and I think women like me because they don’t think I’m competitive, just nice.

The darn trouble with cleaning the house is it gets dirty the next day anyway, so skip a week if you have to. The children are the most important thing.

I’m not being outspoken or pro or con abortion.

Why be afraid of what people will say? Those who care about you will say, Good luck! and those who care only about themselves will never say anything worth listening to anyway.

Bias has to be taught. If you hear your parents downgrading women or people of different backgrounds, why, you are going to do that.

I’m tired now of the elections.

The First Lady is going to be criticized no matter what she does.

You get nothing done if you don’t listen to each other.

The state dinner is almost a formula, but you try to make it interesting. You try not to overload it with too many political types. You try to get a cross section.

To us, family means putting your arms around each other and being there.

Cherish your human connections: your relationships with friends and family.

Where will our country find leaders with integrity, courage, strength-all the family values-in ten, twenty, or thirty years? The answer is that you are teaching them, loving them, and raising them right now.

Being codependent means that when you die, someone else’s life passes before your eyes.

I’ll get laughs in the places I don’t want them and that makes me realize the direction I want to go in. I don’t mean to get too deep into comedy here.

We tend to see God as a means through which we get things to make us happy. For most of us, He has not become our happiness.

To make us feel small in the right way is a function of art; men can only make us feel small in the wrong way.

Synergy does not mean giving up what we want. It means joining to co-create so each is able to receive ever more of what attracts us through joining rather than opposing.

And you would have lost. We were surrounded. He threatened your life, and he would have made good on that threat. He had you, and that meant he had me, too.

I mean, making art is about objectifying your experience of the world, transforming the flow of moments into something visual, or textual, or musical, whatever. Art creates a kind of commentary.

It was no mean trick doing the wiring with those mittens on. But I managed it and crawled out, batting spiders into the shadows. I could hear a thud as they hit the floor joists, then a scuttling sound, then, worst of all, the silence of spiders.