I'll lift you and you lift me, and we'll both ascend together.
During my solitude, conflicting thoughts increased; but much exercise of soul had the effect of causing the scriptures to gain complete ascendancy over me.
I never contemplated any kind of existence or identity after my career. I never thought at some point the entertainment industry is going to be through with me. And when it first occurred to me that my career was going to cease to be ascendant, then I freaked out.
Tahir Pasha assigned me a room when I was staying in his residence, and every night before sleeping, I would spend around three hours going over the books I had memorized. It would take me three months to go through the lot. Thanks be to God, all those works became steps ascending to the truths of the Qur'an.
As my father started ascending in the business, people around me started to treat me different. Our lives changed. So that anxiety, that sort of resentment, I just funneled it through football.
It's, I mean, for me, it's the same as training with my crewmembers. We share the same first part of the flight. We all go together. It's the most critical part of the flight, the ascent.
Meeting Australian mountaineer and author Tim Macartney-Snape when I was 16 in 1994 had a big impact on me. His ascent of Everest from sea to summit captured my imagination.
As I toiled up the Mount of Olives, in the very footsteps of Christ, panting with the heat and the difficult ascent, I found it utterly impossible to conceive that the Deity, in human form, had walked there before me.
When I consider what it was that moved me to join the Communist Party, I have to cast my mind back for more than a quarter of a century to try and ascertain what precisely my motives at that time were.
Once I've ascertained that I'm safe and I'm with a director who is taking care of me, then I'm able to go and do what I need to do and know it's not me, it's the story.
I didn't feel a strong bond with the parents who raised me, and I had anything but a happy childhood. My mother was overly sensitive; my father, ascetic. I was neither. I felt as if I were living with complete strangers. I suspect that my parents felt the same way.
The inner world is very potent for me - I don't ascribe to any God or Jesus or Buddha - I just have a sense of it and revere it along with the natural world and human consciousness.
I find that I sent wolves not shepherds to govern Ireland, for they have left me nothing but ashes and carcasses to reign over!
Hawaii is the best form of comfort for me. When I die, I want to be cremated, and I want half my ashes spread in the Pacific around the island, the rest on the property.
I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.
I had been playing for a while, and I asked Louisville Slugger to send me a dozen flame treated bats. But when I got it, I realized they had sent me a box of ashes.
The finger lick is just a really bad habit - I do it all the time. My wife Ashley is going to kill me if I do it at dinner one more time. I look like an animal about to dig in.
Me and Ashley feel like we're totally different.
I usually do get the tomboy parts in the movies, which is kind of like me, but not totally. I like to shop as much as Ashley, but she is a little more of a girlie-girl than me.
People will run up to me with tears in their eyes and say, 'You're Ashley Graham?' and I match their enthusiasm and respond, 'Yes, I am!' and all they say is, 'Thank you so much.'
