I'm an assistant storyteller. It's like being a waiter or a gas-station attendant, but I'm waiting on six million people a week, if I'm lucky.

Our youth deserve the opportunity to complete their high school and college education, free of early parenthood. Their future children deserve the opportunity to grow up in financially and emotionally stable homes. Our communities benefit from healthy, productive, well-prepared young people.

The reality is sobering: in the United States one in three girls will become pregnant before age 20, totaling more than 750,000 girls per year.

Instead of drifting along like a leaf in a river, understand who you are and how you come across to people and what kind of an impact you have on the people around you and the community around you and the world, so that when you go out, you can feel you have made a positive difference.

To make the revolution in the United States is a slow day by day job that requires patience and discipline. It is the only way to make it. . . . All I know is that despite the fact that I am one of the people who benefit from a capitalist society, I find that any system which exploits other people cannot and should not exist.

When a significant other - a spouse, a parent or someone you're close to - is dying, it forces you to think about your life, about what you feel about death. What I realized from my dad's dying was that I wasn't scared of dying. But I was terrified of regrets. I was terrified of getting to the end of my life with a lot of Why didn't I's.

In my marriages, I'd lost parts of who I was because I was trying to mold myself into what I thought a man wanted me to be.