"Good listeners, like precious gems, are to be treasured."

“When you boil it down, it's all a visual expression. In a sense we are all storytellers through what we wear, who we want to be, how we want people to perceive us. Life, people and the stories they consciously or unconsciously tell inspire me everyday.”

“I never mind the accusations of domesticity, as long as people recognise that all of us, even the luckiest, will live lives in which we have our hearts broken, suffer the loss of loved ones, worry ourselves half to death about our kids.”

“Concocting a good guest list is like seasoning a gourmet sauce. Too many similar ingredients and it's bland. Too much variety in the seasoning and the result may be overpowering.”

Source : Sheila Ostrander (1968). “Etiquette for today”

“Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”

“I think virginity is fine, just as I think having sex is fine. I don't really care what women do sexually, and neither should you. In fact, that's the point. I believe that a young woman's decision to have sex, or not, shouldn't impact how she's seen as a moral actor.”

“God made men by baking them in an oven, but he forgot about the first batch, and that's how Black people were born. And then he was so anxious about the next batch, he took them out of the oven too soon, so that's how White people were made. But the third batch he let cook until they were golden-golden-golden, and, honey, that's you and me.”

“There are things about how a note sounds on a violin that are really analogous to the human voice - you have a frequency and the air, and then you have a timbre which really is overtones - and making those things work together is one thing. The other thing is mechanical: If you can use your hands and arms to create sound on a fiddle, then learning to sing with it is like adding a third body part. And it's all training.”

“What the American people don't understand is how Merrill Lynch or AIG or Lehman Brothers can reward people, and the entity fails. Not only do the shareholders lose, but the entities lose.”