Things I Say

• When you frequently experience ambiguity and uncertainty, you can either spend a lot of time saying "Goodbye" and "I'll miss that" or a lot of time saying "Hello" and "What can I learn from this?"
• That we can go from happy and smiling to sad and hopeless in a blink of an eye is one of the great burdens and miracles of being human.
• One of the tropes I struggle to accept is the one says heroes have to die. Heroes don't need to die to be heroes. The few people in my life I call heroes are heroes because they genuinely change our lives by being alive in a world that increasingly makes it easier to not care.
• Cities like when it rains. It reminds them of when they were forests.
• Every day we're alive is a fight and a celebration, a piece of the past and a piece of the future.
• We are all a little bit of a lot of time.
• I live my life with the intent to be part kid, part adult. The kid keeps me from growing old. The adult keeps me from dying young.
• Life is hell for us rare long-range thinkers and big picture viewers. We see the future and we have no hope, while others see the present and think they have time, but they don't.
• Everything that happens in our lives has the potential to confine us, define us or refine us.
• Only a handful of us gain notoriety. The rest of us toil in mediocrity. 
• You may be surrounded by allies, advocates, and answers...you just need to trust, stand up and ask. 
• I had no choice" often really means "I didn't like the choices I had. 
• I feel like a battered flag at the mercy of the wind, the wars and the weary mile. 
• Reality is the hardest thing for people to accept. 
• The only thing you'll always be right about is that someone somewhere will always think you're wrong. 
• I'm spending a lifetime moving from "I have to be enough" to "I am enough." 
• Parents, teach your children that it's ok to love themselves. It may seem like something you shouldn't have to do. But trust me: On some future date, at 3 in the morning, it's going to be the most important thing they never learned. 
• You can learn more about yourself in the silence of solitude than in the words of the crowd.
• Sometimes the soil of our hearts must be broken to let new seeds of love grow.
• When the trouble began is when humans thought they could put their own lights in the sky and forget about the stars that used to humble them.
• Music with words may speak to my heart; music without words let's my heart speak to me.
• Sometimes it takes a lifetime of repeated events to make a memory; sometimes it takes just one moment.
• Though the world lays heavily on me, I find at the end of the day that I rest only lightly on it.