I will no longer take anyone's word for my experience.

To accept one’s past – one’s history – is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.

Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.

An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.

People can cry much easier than they can change, a rule of psychology people like me picked up as kids on the street.

Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel.

I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.