“At fifty-four, I am still in progress, and I hope that I always will be.”

Do not bring people in your life who weigh you down. And trust your instincts, good relationships feel good. They feel right. They don’t hurt. They’re not painful. That’s not just with somebody you want to marry, but it’s with the friends that you choose. It’s with the people you surround yourselves with.

Trump, with his loud and reckless innuendos, was putting my family’s safety at risk. And for this, I’d never forgive him.

Even if we didn’t know the context, we were instructed to remember that context existed. Everyone on earth, they’d tell us, was carrying around an unseen history, and that alone deserved some tolerance.

Look how I’m managing, I wanted to say in those moments, to my audience of no one. Does everyone see that I’m pulling this off?

In my blinding drive to excel, in my need to do things perfectly, I’d missed the signs and taken the wrong road.

The more popular you became, the more haters you acquired.

I have had to learn that my voice has value. And if I don’t use it, what’s the point of being in the room?

Marriage, he told me early on, struck him as an unnecessary and overhyped convention.

Even if we didn’t know the context, we were instructed to remember that context existed. Everyone on earth, they’d tell us, was carrying around an unseen history, and that alone deserved some tolerance.

The punches hurt, even if I understood that they had little to do with who I really was as a person.

America, our moment is now, Barack said. Our moment is now.

I look back on the discomfort of that moment now and recognize the more universal challenge of squaring who you are with where you come from and where you want to go.

We live by the paradigms we know.

This may be the fundamental problem with caring a lot about what others think: It can put you on the established path—the my-isn’t-that-impressive path—and keep you there for a long time.

Now that I’m an adult, I realize that kids know at a very young age when they’re being devalued, when adults aren’t invested enough to help them learn. Their anger over it can manifest itself as unruliness. It’s hardly their fault. They aren’t bad kids. They’re just trying to survive bad circumstances.

For me, becoming isn’t about arriving somewhere or achieving a certain aim. I see it instead as forward motion, a means of evolving, a way to reach continuously toward a better self. The journey doesn’t end.

I am the girl who everyone said was never going anywhere. I guess I shocked a few people.

Her heart is heavy and ruined with hope.

I’m not desperate but I know that some day I’ll be the coach again of some team.

I have tried to keep on with my striving because this is the only hope I have of ever achieving anything worthwhile and lasting.

I surround myself with trees in the hope I might become a  growing thing, too.

To hurt is simply an act of remembering. Of holding my skin to the edge in the hope I might feel anything at all.

I’m a hopeless romantic and passionate person when it comes to love.

The ‘machine-gun’ approach to photography – by which many negatives are made with the hope that one will be good – is fatal to serious results.