The broken bone, once set together, is stronger than ever.
It's easy to say young people should believe in themselves, but the number one thing is recognizing that it's a journey, that you have to build confidence in yourself.
You start to think bigger when you see how quickly a TV show can catch on in a whole country. That confidence, and thinking big, opened a lot of doors.
Young people can be the catalyst for starting the effort to redefine what's important in America.
Fear is that thing that keeps you up there on that other plateau. Fear is that thing that just keeps you closed down, and quite frankly, alone.
I was on Oprah's show recently talking about the people who impacted me the most. One was a teacher and one was my soccer coach. I didn't even go into my family, who had the most influence.
Michael Sanchez and I grew up in New Jersey, not far from here, playing soccer together. When I was in high school, I worked to start an organization to help senior citizens, which I learned a great deal from.
The United States has faced threats from criminal groups, from terrorists, from spies throughout our history, and we have limited our responses. We haven't resorted to total war every time we have a conflict around the world, because that restraint is what defines us. That restraint is what gives us the moral standing to lead the world.
The only excuse for war is that we may live in peace unharmed.
Every day is a new sense of tearing my heart out of my body again when I see other children who have been killed, and I know what their families are going through.
Whoever you are: in the evening step out of your room, where you know everything; yours is the last house before the far-off: whoever you are. With your eyes, which in their weariness barely free themselves from the worn-out threshold, you lift very slowly one black tree and place it against the sky: slender, alone. And you have made the world. And it is huge and like a word which grows ripe in silence. And as your will seizes on its meaning, tenderly your eyes let it go.