Democracy demands that elected members be able to realize fully the role for which they have been chosen.
Cherish your human connections: your relationships with friends and family.
Your success as a family. . . our success as a nation. . . depends not on what happens inside the White House, but on what happens inside your house.
At the end of your life, you will never regret not having passed one more test, not winning one more verdict or not closing one more deal. You will regret time not spent with a husband, a friend, a child, or a parent.
Never lose sight of the fact that the most important yardstick of your success will be how you treat other people - your family, friends, and coworkers, and even strangers you meet along the way.
If more people could read, write, and comprehend, we could be much closer to solving so many of the other problems our country faces today.
Why be afraid of what people will say? Those who care about you will say, Good luck! and those who care only about themselves will never say anything worth listening to anyway.
When I was little, I met Ronald Reagan. I think I said something to him. He was talking about somebody - he said somebody was like the Clint Eastwood of something, and I said, "I thought he was the Arnold Schwarzenegger," or "more like Arnold Schwarzenegger. " He just looked at me like I was crazy. He didn't know what I was talking about.
Well, you have the public not wanting any new spending, you have the Republicans not wanting any new taxes, you have the Democrats not wanting any new spending cuts, you have the markets not wanting any new borrowing, and you have the economists wanting all of the above. And that leads to paralysis.
I don't want to be left behind. In fact, I want to be here before the action starts.
I will be thin and pure like a glass cup. Empty. Pure as light. Music. I move my hands over my body - my shoulders, my collarbone, my rib cage, my hip bones like part of an animal skull, my small thighs. In the mirror my face is pale and my eyes look bruised. My hair is pale and thin and the light comes through. I could be a lot younger than seventeen. I could be a child still, untouched.