“Sometimes you have to put your fears in order.”

I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live.

It’s hard to say goodbye to the place you’ve lived. It can be as hard as saying goodbye to a person.

Only humans can cry tears.

I looked at everyone and wondered where they came from, and who they missed, and what they were sorry for.

No matter how much I feel, I’m not going to let it out. If I have to cry, I’m gonna cry on the inside. If I have to bleed, I’ll bruise. If my heart starts going crazy, I’m not gonna tell everyone in the world about it. It doesn’t help anything. It just makes everyone’s life worse.

I watched the sheets breathe when she breathed, like how Dad used to say that trees inhale when people exhale, because I was too young to understand the truth about biological processes.

The mistakes I’ve made are dead to me. But I can’t take back the things I never did.

Time was passing like a hand waving from a train that I wanted to be on.

But I believe that things are extremely complicated, and her looking over me was as complicated as anything could ever be. But it was also incredibly simple.

Let love write on you for awhile.

We live in a world made up more of story than stuff. We are creatures of memory more than reminders, of love more than likes.

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.

We can enhance democracy by making it in line with its original vision. Read the dollar bill – E pluribus unum, out of many, one; novus ordo seclorum, a new order of the ages. That’s democracy.

When you use an armament, you use it to defend the civilians. You kill terrorists in order to defend civilians. That’s the natural role of any army in the world.

To put away one’s own original thoughts in order to take up a book is a sin against the Holy Ghost.

I felt the most intense pleasure in piercing the stone in order to make an abstract form and space; quite a different sensation from that of doing it for the purpose of realism.

The public is ready now for a safety net for the middle class, something not just for the poor, but for everyone who will need help, from time to time, in order to own a home, educate their kids, keep themselves healthy or have something to retire on.

Africa is one continent, one people, and one nation.

As an actor, I have casting issues. I’m a minority. I don’t have trouble making a living, but as far as being on the food chain of the pecking order of actors, I’m not at the top of it. With the jobs that I do, there are always control issues with directors and producers.

We must have an economy that does not force the migrant worker’s child to miss school in order to earn…just so the family can eat. That is the moral bankruptcy that trickle-down economics is all about.