"I didn’t have to look at him to know I’d just lost everything I’d ever wanted because I felt it. I felt the loss seep into bone and tissue. I felt it settle between the cracks in my heart and the empty holes in my soul."

"A person' s life is a cycle that involves both his or her events of success and failure. A person should understand that most obstacles can be overcomed, but some of his or her barriers that he or she is born with could not be broken. It can be under control if the person understands his or her own identity."

"Our eyes met and locked as the song came to a halt, followed by a screaming conclusion from the crowd, girls around us pressing me into the stage, forcing all the air out of my lungs, but I’d forgotten about doing anything so basic as breathing."

"Society may no longer define marriage in the only way marriage has ever been defined in the annals of recorded history. Many societies allowed polygamy, many allowed child marriages, some allowed marriage within families; but none, in thousands of years, defined marriage as the union of people of the same sex."

"Everybody knows now that Marie Lightfoot, the true crime writer, is dating Franklin DeWeese, the state attorney of Howard County, Florida. They know I'm a white woman; they know he's a black man. That's not news anymore."

"War is only one facet of the larger problem of evil which has been with the human race since the beginning . . .This same evil tried to destroy the greatest human being who ever lived, nailing Him to a cross."

"There are televisions and radios and the sounds of life, but too there is the sound of death, crying and oxygen tanks, and the squeaky wheels on wheelchairs. Like life and death are in a very close proximity to one another."