To be left alone on the tightrope of youthful unknowing is to experience the excruciating beauty of full freedom and the threat of eternal indecision.

We can learn to see each other and see ourselves in each other and recognize that human beings are more alike than we are unalike.

Nothing will work unless you do.

I don't know if I continue, even today, always liking myself. But what I learned to do many years ago was to forgive myself. It is very important for every human being to forgive herself or himself because if you live, you will make mistakes - it is inevitable. But once you do and you see the mistake, then you forgive yourself and say, 'Well, if I'd known better I'd have done better,' that's all.

At the end of the day people won't remember what you said or did, they will remember how you made them feel.

Listen to some good poetry. You see? It keeps us from thinking we are only what our blatant appetites describe us as.

"Baby, you know?" my mother once said to me. "I think you're the greatest woman I've ever met - and I'm not including my mother or Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt in that." She said, "You are very intelligent and you're very kind, and those two qualities do not often go together." Then she went across the street and got in her car, and I went the other way down to the streetcar. I thought, "Suppose she's right. She's intelligent - and she's too mean to lie." You see, a parent has the chance - and maybe the responsibility - to liberate her child. And my mom had liberated me when I was 17.