“[Y]ou may live in the world as it is, but you can still work to create the world as it should be.”

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 wasn’t going to let one person’s opinion dislodge everything I thought I knew about myself. Instead, I switched my method without changing my goal.

Here’s a memory, which like most memories is imperfect and subjective—collected long ago like a beach pebble and slipped into the pocket of my mind.

Do we settle for the world as it is, or do we work for the world as it should be?

Life was teaching me that progress and change happen slowly. Not in two years, four years, or even a lifetime. We were planting seeds of change, the fruit of which we might never see. We had to be patient.

It felt perverse, how the world just carried on. How everyone was still here, except for my Suzanne.

You have to allow your mind to create and then if you want to censor something and bring it down or point it in a different direction, then you can do it.

Despite a full century of scientific insights attesting to the antiquity of the earth, more than half of our neighbors believe that the entire cosmos was created six thousand years ago. This is, incidentally, about a thousand years after the Sumerians invented glue.

To describe something as being black and white means it is clearly defined. Yet when your ethnicity is black and white, the dichotomy is not that clear. In fact, it creates a grey area.

You are designed to reinvent and re-create yourself, over and over again. And, you are here-whether you want to acknowledge it or not; whether you even know it or not-for the evolution of your own soul.

As technology advances at an alarming pace, the place of drawing remains as valid as ever in the creation of art and architecture.

A dream is a creation of the intelligence, the creator being present but not knowing how it will end.

The woman who can create her own job is the woman who will win fame and fortune.

Nobody owes anybody anything; it’s up to each individual to set high standards for himself or herself, and to set about working hard and creating a solid future.