“Learning to read music in Braille & play by ear helped me develop a [very] good memory.”

“Dreams, if they're any good, are always a little bit crazy. ”

“I never wanted to be famous. I only wanted to be great.”

“I was born with music inside me. Music was one of my parts. Like my ribs, my kidneys, my liver, my heart. Like my blood. It was a force already within me when I arrived on the scene. It was a neces...”

“Music is my life, professionally, for nearly 60 years. To be recognized by the academy is still the highest honor.”

“Music's been around a long time, and there's going to be music long after Ray Charles is dead. I just want to make my mark, leave something musically good behind. If it's a big record, that's the f...”

“In a universe where all life is in movement, where ever fact seen in perspective is totally engaging, we impose stillness on lively young bodies, distort reality to dullness, make action drudgery. ...”

“If only she could be so oblivious again, to feel such love without knowing it, mistaking it for laughter. ”

“When you're a kid all you know is that your dad puts on his suit or overalls and vanishes from your life until nightfall. Sometimes my pops came back exhausted and scarlet-eyed, as if he'd been eng...”

“A wise person knows that he should not allow his roots to grow too deep in this world, for the deeper they grow here, the shallower they become in spirituality.”

“Quite possibly there's nothing as fine as a big freight train starting across country in early summer, Hardesty thought. That's when you learn that the tragedy of plants is that they have roots.”

“I feel weird spilling it now but have to. Because after a while, it took root, the way shared stories do when you live with them long enough. They affect your DNA like radiation. They give birth to...”

“Hope is a gift we give ourselves in our darkest despair.”

“He said he liked my rhythm. I said I liked his heartbeat, and it was within that moment I knew our corners would never meet.”

“There is something in even the darkest situations that we can make a positive in our lives.”