Journalism is what we need to make democracy work.

The best thing to do when you find yourself in a hurting or vulnerable place is to surround yourself with the strongest, finest, most positive people you know.

I love the big fresh starts, the clean slates like birthdays and new years, but I also really like the idea that we can get up every morning and start over.

Circumstances in life often take us places that we never intended to go. We visit some places of beauty, others of pain and desolation.

I think, as most of us do, I put such high expectations on myself that this spills over onto other people. And not everyone is wired this way. Some people can shrug expectations off their shoulders like a cardigan, remaining cool and breezy. Others wear them like a parka with a stuck zipper, hot and stifling.

We all have our ways of handling fear and managing trying; jumping in or climbing down, a direct approach or a delay, joyful or miserable, a spirit of adventure, or God help me, get this thing over with.

When we focus on our gratitude, the tide of disappointment goes out and the tide of love rushes in.

Times of transition are strenuous, but I love them. They are an opportunity to purge, rethink priorities, and be intentional about new habits. We can make our new normal any way we want.

I never imagined that divorce would be part of my life history or my family's legacy. When people say that divorce can be more painful than death, I understand why. But like any great trial, God uses everything for good, if we allow Him to heal us.

I write about the power of trying, because I want to be okay with failing. I write about generosity because I battle selfishness. I write about joy because I know sorrow. I write about faith because I almost lost mine, and I know what it is to be broken and in need of redemption. I write about gratitude because I am thankful - for all of it.

Disappointment is a sticky one, because no one can steal contentment, joy, gratitude, or peace - we have to give it away.

Whether I'm running, working, relating, parenting, learning - whatever I'm doing, I want to surround myself with people who push me.

I don't know any member of Congress who ever said, 'I'm satisfied with the communication that we have from the White House.'

The American dream is about freedom.

Freedom is secured every day by our men and women in uniform. We must build a future worthy of their sacrifice.

For 25 years, it has been my privilege to represent the city of San Francisco and the great state of California; to work to strengthen our vibrant middle class; to secure opportunity and equality.

I really want women to know their power, to value their experience. To understand that nothing has been more wholesome in the political process than the increased involvement of women.

I went to Catholic school throughout my whole academic life. In fact, my children - my husband and I and our children in my own family now have over 100 years of Catholic education among us.

I do believe that during the Bush-Cheney administration, that Vice President Cheney set a tone and an attitude for the CIA.

We're sad about some of the losses of members of great seniority and distinction in the Congress, and some very new members, who will no longer be serving with us.

I say to my colleagues never confine your best work, your hopes, your dreams, the aspiration of the American people to what will be signed by George W. Bush because that is too limiting a factor.

My vision for the future always centers around our children - it always centers around our children. So anytime anybody asks me what are the three most important issues facing the Congress, I always say the same thing: 'Our children, our children, our children.'

Think of an economy where people could be an artist or a photographer or a writer without worrying about keeping their day job in order to have health insurance.

I think about my parents all the time, especially on Sunday when I'm at Mass. My mother always said, 'We do not pray to win elections. We pray for people's health, we pray that God's will be done, we pray that we do our best. But we do not pray to win elections.'

The president led us into the Iraq war on the basis of unproven assertions without evidence; he embraced a radical doctrine of pre-emptive war unprecedented in our history; and he failed to build a true international coalition.

Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of weapons of mass destruction technology which is a threat to countries in the region and he has made a mockery of the weapons inspection process.

The Republican Party is the Grand Old Party. It's made enormous contributions to the success of our country. And it is a party that has embraced its leadership role when it has had the majority or the White House.

I would say that one of the things that encouraged me so much when I became elected to the leadership was the letters I received from fathers of daughters, saying that, 'My daughter can now do many more things because of what you did.'

A successful marriage is a decision. You decide it's going to work. You can't always be there, but you have to be there enough. And you have to make sure you are where you're needed most.

I always saw politics as an expansion of my role as a mom.

With Americans worried about losing their jobs, their savings, their homes and their chance at the American Dream, the New Direction Congress will work in a bipartisan way to lift our economy and help America's middle class.

No, I was never one of those positive people who believes he can have whatever he sets his sights on. I just kept working at it.

The trouble with eating Italian food is that five or six days later you're hungry again.

What I've said before, only half in joke, is that everybody in Ireland is famous. Or, maybe better, say everybody is familiar.

At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.

I don't think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political.

But that citizen's perception was also at one with the truth in recognizing that the very brutality of the means by which the IRA were pursuing change was destructive of the trust upon which new possibilities would have to be based.

Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.

Nowadays, what an award gives is a sense of solidarity with the poetry guild, as it were: sustenance coming from the assent of your peers on the judging panel.

In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.

Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.

Poetry is more a threshold than a path.

In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.

The experimental poetry thing is not my thing. It's a programme of the avant-garde: basically a refusal of the kind of poetry I write.

I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.

Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.

The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself - as a vocation and an elevation almost.

A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.

Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.

The completely solitary self: that's where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.