I have a particular affliction. I am unable to say a word I can't spell.

I'm dying always.

If you send up a weather vane or put your thumb up in the air every time you want to do something different, to find out what people are going to think about it, you're going to limit yourself. That's a very strange way to live.

I am grateful that my horizons were not narrowed at the outset.

Problems arise in that one has to find a balance between what people need from you and what you need for yourself.

I have a particular affliction. I am unable to say a word I can't spell.

'Swan,' by Mary Oliver. Poems and prose. Reading from this book is as if visiting a very wise friend. There is wisdom and welcoming kindness on every page.

A person has the right, and I think the responsibility, to develop all of their talents.

Growing up in Augusta in such a protected and loving community is something that I really enjoy talking about. I love talking about - even though I grew up, of course, in the time of segregated schools: Brown vs. Board of Education came along after I was already in first grade.

I am deeply spiritual; I revel in those things that make for good - the things that we can do to shed a little light, to help place an oft-dissonant universe back in tune with itself... Long live art, long live friendship, long live the joy of life!

I feel comfortable singing in the great cathedrals of the world because I spent so much time as a child singing in church. And it isn't very different. Of course, nothing looks quite like Notre Dame de Paris.

I have enjoyed most particularly reading the correspondence between Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss. The genuine friendship, competitiveness and support that thread through their communications are life lessons for us all.

I knew that I was loved. And that's such an important thing. And, of course, at such an early age, you take it for granted. Of course your parents love you. Of course Mrs. Hubert across the street loves you and your godmother loves you and your grandparents love you.

I like so many different kinds of music that I've never allowed myself the limitations of one particular range.

I read everything. I'll read a John Grisham novel, I'll sit and read a whole book of poems by Maya Angelou, or I'll just read some Mary Oliver - this is a book that was given to me for Christmas. No particular genre. And I read in French, and I read in German, and I read in English. I love to see how other people use language.

I try to frighten my very young colleagues into studying and understanding their voices before they attempt things that are beyond them. It's wise to take gymnastics and swimming to strengthen the body, because people don't realise what an athletic undertaking singing actually is.

I want to keep learning, keep exploring, keep doing more.

I want to sing more in Spanish. I want to sing the songs of Granados; the songs of Montsalvatge. To do things that truly I've not done before.

I was given a stethoscope in a child's 'doctor's bag' at about age six and I loved it! One could hear the heart beating through that plastic toy.

I wasn't born Austrian; I wasn't born German. My roots are from Africa, and I do not have any reason for not wanting to celebrate that. Every time that I can, I like to kind of mention it, you know, just to keep people sort of knowing exactly what's going on. My French is pretty good, but I'm still African, thank you very much.

It is still more likely that a woman's power would be seen as aggression, and a man's power would be seen as assertion.

It takes a caring community to raise a child that will be a whole person and a contributing citizen.

One has to draw upon one's own musical thoughts and one's own musical acumen, and not to be afraid to let that come into one's work. Perhaps that comes with more experience, but perhaps it also comes with daring, and believing that you should.

One needs more than ambition and talent to make a success of anything, really. There must be love and a vocation.

One of the reasons that I take such joy in being a trustee of the New York Public Library is the love of reading that I found as a child in the Saturday morning library events for preschoolers and first and second graders as I was growing up in Augusta, GA.

There has never been a time when I was not committed to, involved in, or caring of, the social and political issues of my world.

There is a lot of propaganda about opera singers not being able to act. That's not necessarily true and hasn't been true for a very long time. And certainly there were those instances when singers were told they need to fit into a certain size dress. Of course, women. Men? They just make the costume bigger.

Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.

When something an affliction happens to you, you either let it defeat you, or you defeat it.

We can stand affliction better than we can prosperity, for in prosperity we forget God.

I have known no man of genius who had not to pay, in some affliction or defect either physical or spiritual, for what the gods had given him.

Vanity of science. Knowledge of physical science will not console me for ignorance of morality in time of affliction, but knowledge of morality will always console me for ignorance of physical science.

Affliction comes to us, not to make us sad but sober; not to make us sorry but wise.

The true believer is rewarded in every thing, even in affliction.

God's way of answering the Christian's prayer for more patience, experience, hope and love often is to put him into the furnace of affliction.

As threshing separates the wheat from the chaff, so does affliction purify virtue.

Affliction is not sent in vain, young man, from that good God, who chastens whom he loves.

When I am in the cellar of affliction, I look for the Lord's choicest wines.

Pour not on the comforts you want, but upon the mercies you have. Look rather at God's ending in afflicting, than to the measure and degree of your affliction.

Difficult as it is really to listen to someone in affliction, it is just as difficult for him to know that compassion is listening to him.

Our task, of course, is to transmute the anger that is affliction into the anger that is determination to bring about change. I think, in fact, that one could give that as a definition of revolution.

Some virtues are only seen in affliction and others only in prosperity.

Affliction is a school of virtue; it corrects levity, and interrupts the confidence of sinning.

Affliction is a treasure, and scarce any man hath enough of it.

Iron till it be thoroughly heated is incapable to be wrought; so God sees good to cast some men into the furnace of affliction, and then beats them on his anvil into what frame he pleases.

The sorrow for the dead is the only sorrow from which we refuse to be divorced. Every other wound we seek to heal - every other affliction to forget: but this wound we consider it a duty to keep open - this affliction we cherish and brood over in solitude.

Cure yourself of the affliction of caring how you appear to others. Concern yourself only with how you appear before God, concern yourself only with the idea that God may have of you.

Affliction's sons are brothers in distress; A brother to relieve, how exquisite the bliss!

Affliction is the wholesome soil of virtue, where patience, honor, sweet humility, and calm fortitude, take root and strongly flourish.