“Papa Don’t Preach”

Embrace your imperfections!

Power is being told you’re not loved and not being destroyed by it.

I always thought of losing my virginity as a career move.

I want to be like Gandhi and Martin Luther King and John Lennon but I want to STAY ALIVE.

We are not here to be popular, we are here to be free.

Fear and hate aren’t traits that make America great.

The eyes are the window of the soul.

Unapologetic Bitch.

Better to live one year as a tiger, than a hundred as sheep.

To be brave is to love someone unconditionally, without expecting anything in return. To just give. That takes courage because we don’t want to fall on our faces or leave ourselves open to hurt.

It’s not easy having a good marriage – but I don’t want easy. Easy doesn’t make you grow. Easy doesn’t make you think. I thank God every day that I am married to a man who makes me think. That’s my definition of true love.

There is something comforting about being tied up. Like when you were a baby and your mother strapped you in the car seat. She wanted you to be safe. It was an act of love.

I am my own experiment. I am my own work of art.

We all need to treat each other with human dignity and respect

Anyone can be touched by magic.

Shit on the ground pretty much sums it up.

When my father died, the money he left us would have dried up within a year were it not for my mother. We might very well have ended up on welfare.

When you’re 6 or 7, your father becomes this wonderful presence in your life. I really responded to my father. And then, the very moment I realized that I loved him unconditionally, that life was going to be great just because he was in it, he was gone.

Daddy taught us through his philosophy of nonviolence, which placed love at the centerpiece, that through that love we can turn enemies into friends. Through that love, we can create more dignified atmospheres.

You look most like your father when you smile. It’s your ultimate betrayal.

I know that the absence of my father in my life had its cost.

One of the regrettable things in my life is that my dad was not around to see my stardom, to see me wrestle or to see what I achieved by the dream I had at an early age, influenced by where he would like to go.

My father gave me formal education in raagdari. He died in Lahore in 1964 when I was 13. I was in the tenth year of school, and my father’s brother took me into the qawwali ensemble and started giving me formal education in qawwali.

I never told my father I loved him before he died, and I have a lot of issues about that. They’re all swimming around in my head, in my heart, unresolved, and in a way it felt fitting to dedicate the film to him.