“People say having kids is life changing, well that doesn't necessarily mean a good thing, does it? I could take one of my legs off. That would change my life.”

“I grasped two things: I wasn't as happy as I could be, and my life wasnt going to change unless I made it change.”

“The meaning I picked, the one that changed my life: Overcome fear, behold wonder.”

“I never forgot that schooling had irretrievably changed my family’s life. That knowledge, however, did not weaken ambition. Instead, it strengthened resolve. Those times I remembered the loss of my past with regret, I quickly reminded myself of all the things my teachers could give me. (They could make me an educated man.) I tightened my grip on pencil and books. I evaded nostalgia. Tried hard to forget. But one does not forget by trying to forget. One only remembers. I remembered too well that education had changed my family’s life. I would not have become a scholarship boy had I not so often remembered.”

“In the heart of the sphere of everything that keeps changing, there one thing that never changes—life. Life is the one thing that stays with me until the very end. Today, people may like me. Tomorrow, they may not. But my life is still there. It is not subject to good and bad. Human beings are the thinkers—homo sapiens—the ones with the brains. We can think about things, and in our thoughts, everything keeps changing. In our moods, everything keeps changing. Yet, in our beings, there is the heart, and the heart does not change because it is consistent with only one thing. Our needs on the outside change all the time, but the heart's need never changes. It is consistently the same, and always will be.”

“Just because i know how to change a guys oil doesn't mean i want to spend the rest of my life on my back, staring up his undercarriage.”

“Of course, for a lot of people, death was a welcome change. Grinding poverty takes the edge off most things, including life.”

“Things change, people change, but that doesn't mean you should forget the past.”

“I knew I would hate my best memory because it would prove that people could fake love or that love could end or worst of all, love was not powerful enough to change a life.”

“"Since we cannot change reality, let us change the eyes which see reality," says one of my favorite Byzantine mystics. I did this when a child; I do it now as well in the most creative moments of my life.”