“Leaders decorate the world; character is their paint. They live exemplary life and make the world better than they found it.”

“To succeed, you have to be open to problems. You have to be open to failure. And as you go up the ladder, you gain the right to get more problems.”

“You can’t gather much if you won’t go on risk expedition. Leaders never fear the thorns; they’ll still go in for the beautiful roses no matter the number of pricks they’ll get.”

“We are a people of improbable hope.”

“But whenever I tried to pin down this idea of self-esteem, the specific qualities we hoped to inculcate, the specific means by which we might feel good about ourselves, the conversation always seemed to follow a path of infinite regress. Did you dislike yourself because of your color or because you couldn’t read and couldn’t get a job? Or perhaps it was because you were unloved as a child—only, were you unloved because you were too dark? Or too light? Or because your mother shot heroin into her veins … and why did she do that anyway? Was the sense of emptiness you felt a consequence of kinky hair or the fact that your apartment had no heat and no decent furniture? Or was it because deep down you imagined a godless universe? Maybe one couldn’t avoid such questions on the road to personal salvation. What I doubted was that all the talk about self-esteem could serve as the centerpiece of an effective black politics. It demanded too much honest self-reckoning from people; without such honesty, it easily degenerated into vague exhortation. Perhaps with more self-esteem fewer blacks would be poor, I thought to myself, but I had no doubt that poverty did nothing for our self-esteem. Better to concentrate on the things we might all agree on. Give that black man some tangible skills and a job. Teach that black child reading and arithmetic in a safe, well-funded school. With the basics taken care of, each of us could search for our own sense of self-worth.”

“Trees cause more pollution than automobiles do.” 

“I’d closed my ears to my friends’ horror stories about married life. “Ha! Now you get to argue about who should change the diapers.” Or “What kind of food makes a woman stop giving blow jobs? Wedding cake!” Or “Oh boy, wait until she hits menopause.” I paid no attention to any of that. “Just let me stumble into it,” I told them. “I don’t want to be forewarned.”

“The universe is full of doors,”

“God cares about every area of our lives, and God wants us to ask for help.”

“Major barriers to successful planning are fear of change, ignorance, uncertainty about the future, and lack of imagination.”

“I can never forget what is my whole life.”

“Lucy went first, biting her lip and trying not to say all the things she thought of saying to Susan. But she forgot them when she fixed her eyes on Aslan.”

“Refuse to be small no matter how many times people insist on squeezing you. The same people who carelessly call you “Hey” are the same people who will cheerfully call you “Hi” when you continue to drive your life positively!”

“There was no solution but that usual solution which life gives to all questions, even the most complex and insoluble. That answer one must live in the needs of one that - that is, forget oneself.”

“La vida no está libre de problemas, y nunca lo estará. Solamente encontrarás a un grupo de personas que están libres de problemas, y tienes que ir al cementerio de tu ciudad para encontrarlas. Mientras tengamos aliento, vamos a tener épocas de abundancia y épocas en que luchemos, épocas en que las circunstancias sean buenas y otras en que sean malas. Que las circunstancias hagan lo que quieran; en cuanto a ti, decide permanecer estable.”