Graduation

Hunger, inadequate medical care, poor housing, and inferior schools are the enemies of wonder. Doors closed for so many of our innately curious children cannot easily be opened.

Recognize your limitations, and sure enough, they're yours. The world will provide you with every imaginable obstacle, but the one most difficult to overcome will be the lack of faith in yourself.

For every five minutes you spend looking into a mirror, spend five times that amount of time looking out at the world. Your happiness has a lot more to do with how you see the world than how the world sees you.

The only way sexism can truly harm you is if you get used to it. Don't ever get used to it.

We are magicians. We are alchemists, sorcerers and wizards. We are a very strange bunch. But there is great fun in being a wizard.

What I do, in my opinion, is by no means extraordinary. I am merely competent. But in an age of incompetence, that makes me extraordinary.

Being a musician is not something you chose to be, it is something you are. There is no choice, either you is or you ain't.

And at last you'll know with surpassing certainty that only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth. And that is not speaking.

Never cook for or sleep with anyone who routinely puts you down.

Your B.A. does not belong to you alone, just as the earth does not belong to its present tenants alone. Your education was lent to you by women of the past, and you will give some back to living women, and to your daughters seven generations from now.

Letting your mind play is the best way to solve problems.

Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive.