My home life, growing up, was like tumbling inside a washing machine as I shuttled around the middle of Kentucky with my mother. She was never content to stay in one place, or with one man, for too long. She was as smart as she was independent, though, and always landed some job that brought in a little money.
You can make something big when young that will carry you through life. Look at all the big startups like Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. They were all started by very young people who stumbled on something of unseen value. You'll know it when you hit a home run.
I couldn't hit a home run to save my life, and I was a sucker for the curveball.
If I were running to be somebody, there are a lot of easier sombodies to be. After all, running against the incumbent governor of your own party in your home state is not the next logical step in a political life.
It's been a long time since I lived in Michigan, but I did grow up there for 18 to 20 years of my life. It does feel my home state.
As a callow 18-year-old leaving for college, I'd seen my home town as a mere launching pad for a life in worldlier locales, a place to be from rather than a place to be.
When you go off in the world and make your life, and you come back to your home town, and you find your old high-school friends driving in the same circles, doing the same things, that's what Hollywood's like. It's a little block, little town. It doesn't really grow or change.
I fled my home town and did odd jobs, including things like re-designing old furniture, before I became an actor. Having said that, I don't think the story of my life is in any way remarkable. What is remarkable is how acting opportunities have come my way.
In Denver, I was a homebody, and that's a life I'd chosen with great happiness. I wanted that break from the arc lights and focus on building a lovely home, have some fun, look after my kids and do things that I had missed out on while pursuing my dream.
I'm a regular Canadian girl. I enjoy staying home. In the summer I've got a garden. I'm very much a homebody, a normal, family-oriented girl. But I do have this other incredible side of my life that involves acting and traveling.
As an immigrant, I truly believed when I was coming to this country that people had the tools necessary to life to live a life that is prosperous, that is just and free. So, every single day, I am shocked with the hypocrisy of this country. That we are the wealthiest nation in the world. But we cannot figure out how to house our homeless people.
A farmer travelling with his load Picked up a horseshoe on the road, And nailed if fast to his barn door, That luck might down upon him pour; That every blessing known in life Might crown his homestead and his wife, And never any kind of harm Descend upon his growing farm.
You just don't know in life. Life knocks you about and pushes you over boundaries. But be ready. Do your homework; that's all I can say.
It is impossible for me to estimate how many of my early impressions of the world, correct and the opposite, came to me through newspapers. Homicide, adultery, no-hit pitching, and Balkanism were concepts that, left to my own devices, I would have encountered much later in life.
Life on the planet is being homogenized by the expanding human population and the frequent and rapid movement of people and goods, which carry invasive organisms with them. These invasives often flourish in their new ecosystems because, like the woolly adelgid, they have escaped their predators.
Why, on my mother's birthday, am I thinking about 'Father Knows Best?' At our house, mother knew best at least as often as father did, but then the title of the old sitcom, a homogenized portrait of American family life, was meant to be slightly sardonic.
The curious thing is that I embraced homosexuality with as much joy and delight as I've embraced everything else in my life.
That's my advice to all homosexuals, whether they're in the Boy Scouts, or in the Army or in high school: Shut up, don't tell anybody what you do, your life will be a lot easier.
The life of the nation is secure only while the nation is honest, truthful, and virtuous.
The walls are raised against honest men in civic life.
