Make your own talent, make your own luck, and activate your stubborn streak, and there's nothing that can stop you.

You can't say: This much love is worth this much misery. They're not opposites that cancel each other out; they're both true at the same time.

Dressing badly has been a refuge much of my life, a way of compelling others to engage with my mind, not my physical presence. Page. 283

I war running back to the house in Mayaguez with a melting ice cone we called a piraqua running sweet and sticky down my face and arms, the sun in my eyes, breaking through clouds and glinting off the rain-soaked pavement and dripping leaves. I was running with joy, an overwhelming joy that arose simply from gratitude for the fact of being alive. Along with the image, memory carried these words from a child's mind through time: I am blessed. In this life I am truly blessed.

There is indeed something deeply wrong with a person who lacks principles, who has no moral core. There are, likewise, certainly values that brook no compromise, and I would count among them integrity, fairness, and the avoidance of cruelty. But I have never accepted the argument that principle is compromised by judging each situation on its own merits, with due appreciation of the idiosyncrasy of human motivation and fallibility.

There are uses to adversity, and they don't reveal themselves until tested.

Good people can do bad things, make bad decisions. It doesn't make them bad people.