My father had gone to Vietnam.
Concentrate on the things that matter to you.
I'm not just a cuckolded wife.
You recognize a survivor when you see one. You recognize a fighter when you see one.
My job as the mother of daughters is to make sure my children see that every opportunity is available to them.
What happened after Katrina is that people were stirred to action; there were an enormous number of contributions by people trying to make a difference. But then we forget. We've forgotten Katrina victims, we've forgotten the face of poverty.
Cancer is not a straight line. It's up and down.
I think self-knowledge is the rarest trait in a human being.
Tabloid news is tabloid news.
I don't know why someone else's marriage has anything to do with me.
I could be wrong, but I think heterosexual marriage is threatened more by heterosexuals. I don't know why gay marriage challenges my marriage in any way.
I'm a puzzle doer.
If people think that you're throwing babies out, dissecting children, to do stem-cell research, I'm not for that.
I was a 16-year-old girl at one point, so of course I wrote poetry.
By what you do, you teach your children how to respond to difficult information.
We were never a family that had a lot. We had enough, but not a lot.
There is nothing about resilience that I can say that my father did not first utter silently in eighteen years of living inside a two-dimensional cutout of himself.
Whenever anyone pulls out of the race, you know, unless they've just been trounced in the days before, there's also - always a lot of questions about why that happened.
Maybe we all change over time.
You know, there are no guarantees on prognosis.
You have to have enough respect for other human beings to leave their lives alone. If you admire that life, build it for yourself. Don't just try to come in and take somebody else's life.
The worst thing to me would be that you put on the face you think people want to see, and then they don't like it and you think, Would they have liked the real me?
You know, everybody knows some of what politicians say is malarkey, and having somebody there to call them on it is good. I'd be happy to do that any time and any place.
I love my books.
My job is to stay alive until the medicine and research catch up.
It takes a lot of work to put together a marriage, to put together a family and a home.
I took my son's name. I didn't take my husband's name.
Honestly, I get energized by the crowds. They feed me emotionally.
I'm a recovering lawyer. The practice of law has changed. Every agreement is a fight.
People find it a great blessing if their child left behind a child.
I have a husband who adores me.
Sometimes you get politicians who dig their feet into the sand and aren't willing to listen to another voice.
I've had experiences that, you know, really couldn't be replaced.
Either you push forward with the things that you were doing yesterday or you start dying.
I hope I have important things to say.
I've often said that the most important thing you can give your children is wings. Because, you're not gonna always be able to bring food to the nest. You're... sometimes... they're gonna have to be able to fly by themselves.
We're all going to die.
I have three living children for whom this is a father who I want them to love and on whom they're going to have to rely if my disease takes a bad turn.
Successful health reform must not just make health insurance affordable, affordable health insurance has to make health care affordable.
A lot of people have great hope, and a lot of people who have great hope live. And, some of them who have great hope die. So it's not that hope is going to save you.
The military is already sexually integrated.
I come out of real life.
Part of what I want to do is sort of reclaim my story - it belongs to me and to my children, who have to live with whoever their mother is.
Growing up in an Italian family, you use a harsh tone and 10 minutes later everybody forgets about it.
I'm not praying for God to save me from cancer. I'm not. God will enlighten me when the time comes. And if I've done the right thing, I will be enlightened. And if I believe, I'll be saved. And that's all he promises me.
I've spent a lot of words on my own mortality.
Resilience is accepting your new reality, even if it's less good than the one you had before.
You all know that I have been sustained throughout my life by three saving graces - my family, my friends, and a faith in the power of resilience and hope. These graces have carried me through difficult times and they have brought more joy to the good times than I ever could have imagined.
I think that we're foolhardy to not be engaging in federal funding of stem-cell research in the most aggressive way we possibly can.
