There is really only one way to deal with Misery. Accept her presence. Like most experiences in life, we must acknowledge the passage gracefully and let her move through our lives because she brings with her a hidden gift.
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.
When I was a grad student at MIT, I had a chance to become friends with the Viking Mission's chief scientist, Dr. Gerald Soffen. Viking was the first Mars lander looking for signs of life on Mars.
In grad school, I led a bit of a double life. I don't mean gender-wise - I just mean intellectually.
It's the uncertainty, the challenge and the willingness to put it all on the line that draws a lot of people to climb mountains. That can also apply to a lot of other challenges in life, whether it's running for office, starting a family, going to grad school or taking all of your cash and assets and starting a business.
I'm half-and-half on school. I had fun in grade school, but when I went to college, it was the worst place I've ever been in my entire life.
I can feel the gradual decline of energy and vitality. And I mean generally, every year, when you know you are not on the same level as last year. But that's life.
I finished up my graduate degree in quantum mechanics, but underwent a bit of a personal crisis, recognizing that I didn't want to do that for the rest of my life. It was too abstract, too far removed from human concerns.
My grandmother wanted my father to be a teacher because she was a teacher. He didn't go down that road until much later in life; he just kind of retired after almost 20 years as being a visiting lecturer at Stanford, where he got his graduate degree.
When I left for college, I put Miami behind me and tried to have a life of the mind. I got a graduate degree. I traveled. I even married a fellow writer, whose only real estate was a dingy one-bedroom apartment in Paris, where we lived.
I had no idea when I graduated from high school and then from graduate school what I wanted to do with my life. I had no idea that I was ever going to be an actor.
For the first ten years after I got out of graduate school, I studied success. I read every book I could get my hands on and took every training I could find, and that allowed me to become an expert in this area. I learned how to create high self-esteem and success in my own life and in the lives of others.
Over my life as a teacher, women have been too quiet. I'm quiet myself. I don't think I said three words the whole of graduate school.
At graduate school in 1999, I finally had the chance to examine why I believe what I believe. I realised that I'd had no period in my life where I'd consciously tried to develop my own theology.
If your son graduates from Harvard, people will regard him as smart and highly qualified for the rest his life and give him access to opportunities. He'll be able to get any job he wants.
You are graduating from college. That means that this is the first day of the last day of your life. No, that's wrong. This is the last day of the first day of school. Nope, that's worse. This is a day.
I'm at least smart enough to know I could never fill Billy Graham's shoes, but I'm grateful he gave me an opportunity to help him finish his race on earth well and to continue his life's work.
That's all you do in life: you find your perch, and if it suits you, just carry on. There's nothing Graham Greene about it.
Quest is at the heart of what I do-the holy grail, and the terror that you'll never find it, seemed a perfect metaphor for life.
My father, who was a cabinetmaker, told me, 'Wood has a grain and if you go into the grain, you have beauty. If you go against it, you have splinters - it breaks.' And I took that as my view of life. You have to follow the grain - to be sensitive to the direction of life.
