“To the people who love you, you are beautiful already. This is not because theyre blind to your shortcomings but because they so clearly see your soul. Your shortcomings then dim by comparison. The...”

“Because I was more often happy for other people, I got to spend more time being happy. And as I saw more light in everybody else, I seemed to have more myself. (250)”

“Sometimes customizing is necessary because of an injury or the inability to do, for a short or long period, the kind of exercise you formerly did. When you're used to customizing for fun, doing it ...”

“A simple life is not seeing how little we can get by withthats povertybut how efficiently we can put first things first. . . . When youre clear about your purpose and your priorities, you can painl...”

“Sometimes youll hear, People dont change. This is true more often than it ought to be, but listen again: People dont change. It says dont, not cant. (316)”

“It stands to reason that anyone who learns to live well will die well. The skills are the same: being present in the moment, and humble, and brave, and keeping a sense of humor. (361)”

“I finally know the difference between pleasing and loving, obeying and respecting. It has taken me so many years to be okay with being different, and with being this alive, this intense. (xxvi)”

“Spring passes and one remembers one's innocence.Summer passes and one remembers one's exuberance.Autumn passes and one remembers one's reverence.Winter passes and one remembers one's perseverance.”

“Birthdays could be such a bummer when you were older than the country you lived in.”

“With a few exceptions, the media have phrased the past five months as a contest of wills between Bush and Saddam Hussein, not as a moment of deragement between two armed madmen willing to order the...”

“Music itself was color-blind but the media and the radio stations segregate it based on their perceptions of the artists.”

“The mediastenographers to power.”

“War is society's dirty work, usually done by kids cleaning up some failure on the part of the adults.”

“War is the echo that never dies. No society strives for war, they are always tricked into it.”

“How can our words ever truly be our own? Since we started growing all we've been taught is to care how we represent our persona and how we should communicate appropriately and how we portrait ourse...”