All Quotes

"You are the one who builds, breaks, creates, and fixes your life. No one else can do that for you. It all starts with a decision."

"Every single person on this planet has a powerful story to tell."

"If my work will get five yeses, my family should get equal yeses."

"When you listen to them without any judgment, without any agenda, you just listen… they will warm and open up to you."

"Before every interview, I remind myself to have a clean heart and a right spirit."

"I've learned what not to do, and those lessons shaped how I host now."

"It's so much fun when you're doing something that feeds your soul."

"If intention is good, then you will reap the benefits."

"Talk to yourself first...you become what you think about."

"What matters most in relationships are love and trust, not the years."

"My parents fought hard to be together, I grew up witnessing that. So, I feel like Seve deserves that.I deserve a complete family that I have right now."

"I think the most important things in a relationship are relationship and faith with God, loyalty and respect."

"I don’t love to take ownership. I love to connect."

"I’ll never clip your wings baby. If you want to fly then spread your wings and fly."

"This is my passion. I love live selling. I love what I do."

"As you all know, I’m a mom already so I also need to be practical and to be able to budget, of course, our money."

"I don’t want naman to sacrifice talaga [the quality]. I want to get the value of my money. So I really shop for good quality and affordable pieces."

"Miss Universe is my dream."

"There are still a lot of people who are doing this out of passion, out of love. We are doing this because being in the pageant is our dream, it’s our moms’ dream, or just a dream of special people around us. And for some people to discredit the hard work that we’re putting in this, is unfair."

"Only by successful war can we obtain peace."

"His wise and unwearying efforts to reform his diocese, whose clergy were in a deplorable state, were crowned with unhoped-for success."

"My @missuniverse experience has taught me that as a woman, I can be ANYTHING and that I can do EVERYTHING if I put my mind and heart into it."

"Even if I had paid that much, even if we did have that much money, it is our choice, and our freedom to do what we want with money that we earned."

"I've been so honest about the privileges I've been given, and the privilege that I have in my life."

"I have the freedom to dance to the music I hear, regardless of whether people can hear it too."

"I never really did social media for money. I did it for fun, self expression, and community."

"I, a singular teenage girl, am not responsible for the wealth disparity in the Philippines."

"Advocate for those in need, or you can also volunteer, volunteering is free. I've done it."

"The bullying convinced me I was damaged, inadequate, and worthless. But now, I see how wrong I was."

"I now understand how much I have to offer. I know who I am, feel secure in myself, and am no longer swayed by others’ opinions."

"2024 was a whirlwind of ups and downs. But as I step into 2025, I can’t see a reason not to live."

"At home, we cooked the traditional way, with a unique Saurashtrian curry powder, used for all kinds of gravies. Mutton was the main dish — as a kid, I remember eating mutton for breakfast, lunch and dinner. By the time, I hit my teens, I was fed up with the mutton overdose."

"I have been body shamed. My body’s size and complexion have often been ridiculed and stared at by people. At the same time, a lot of people loved me for my body. So I am never unhappy about my beautiful body. I clearly know that it was my physical appeal rather than my acting skills which made me achieve all these. For the same reason, many have deceived me making false promises."

"I literally starved for months. Getting a bikini body is not a joke, as you need to get that structure first to sport one. I hope I look good, and it has come out really well. I never thought I could put it off."

"I don't buy a lot of bags or shoes, but it's easier to cut beef out of your diet than to not get the new pair of sneakers you need."

"I want people to feel they can do things. They may not be easy things, but the possibility of change exists."

"I also think the scale of the change is only going to be solved by governmental action and corporate responsibility, which often will come from governmental regulation. Which is why it's so important to be able to vote and understand these issues."

"When you are dying, at least in my limited experience, you start remembering everything. Images come in flashes — people and places and stray conversations — and refuse to stop."

"The diagnosis was acute myeloid leukemia, with a rare mutation called Inversion 3. It was mostly seen in older patients. Every doctor I saw asked me if I had spent a lot of time at Ground Zero, given how common blood cancers are among first responders. I was in New York on 9/11, in the sixth grade, but I didn’t visit the site until years later. I am not elderly — I had just turned thirty-four."

"I did not — could not — believe that they were talking about me. I had swum a mile in the pool the day before, nine months pregnant. I wasn’t sick. I didn’t feel sick. I was actually one of the healthiest people I knew. I regularly ran five to ten miles in Central Park. I once swam three miles across the Hudson River — eerily, to raise money for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. I work as an environmental journalist, and for one article I skied the Birkebeiner, a fifty-kilometre cross-country race in Wisconsin, which took me seven and a half hours. I loved to have people over for dinner and to make cakes for my friends’ birthdays. I went to museums and plays and got to jump in a cranberry bog for my job. I had a son whom I loved more than anything and a newborn I needed to take care of. This could not possibly be my life."

"I ended up spending five weeks at Columbia-Presbyterian, and the strangeness and sadness of what I was being told about myself made me hunt for the humor in it. I didn't know what else to do. I decided that everyone in the hospital had Munchausen syndrome by proxy, and I was their target. It was a joke that I found funnier than everyone else did. Later, when I was bald and had a scrape on my face from a fall, my joke was that I was a busted-up Voldemort."

"I know that not everyone can be married to a doctor, but, if you can, it’s a very good idea. He is perfect, and I feel so cheated and so sad that I don't get to keep living the wonderful life I had with this kind, funny, handsome genius I managed to find. My parents and my brother and sister, too, have been raising my children and sitting in my various hospital rooms almost every day for the last year and a half. They have held my hand unflinchingly while I have suffered, trying not to show their pain and sadness in order to protect me from it. This has been a great gift, even though I feel their pain every day. For my whole life, I have tried to be good, to be a good student and a good sister and a good daughter, and to protect my mother and never make her upset or angry. Now I have added a new tragedy to her life, to our family's life, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it."

"Kung sa bagay, ’di ko naman sinara ang puso ko—may konting puwang! (It is hard to say never. Besides, I did not close my heart; I left it ajar.)"

"If we trust in God, we too can carry out the mission that He has entrusted to us."

"During the latest clinical trial, my doctor told me that he could keep me alive for a year, maybe. My first thought was that my kids, whose faces live permanently on the inside of my eyelids, wouldn’t remember me. My son might have a few memories, but he'll probably start confusing them with pictures he sees or stories he hears. I didn't ever really get to take care of my daughter — I couldn't change her diaper or give her a bath or feed her, all because of the risk of infection after my transplants. I was gone for almost half of her first year of life. I don't know who, really, she thinks I am, and whether she will feel or remember, when I am gone, that I am her mother."

"Meanwhile, during the CAR-T treatment, a method developed over many decades with millions of dollars of government funding, my cousin Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., was in the process of being nominated and confirmed as the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Throughout my treatment, he had been on the national stage: previously a Democrat, he was running for President as an Independent, but mostly as an embarrassment to me and the rest of my immediate family. In August, 2024, he suspended his campaign and endorsed Donald Trump, who said that he was going to "let Bobby go wild" on health. My mother wrote a letter to the Senate, to try and stop his confirmation; my brother had been speaking out against his lies for months. I watched from my hospital bed as Bobby, in the face of logic and common sense, was confirmed for the position, despite never having worked in medicine, public health, or the government. Suddenly, the health-care system on which I relied felt strained, shaky. Doctors and scientists at Columbia, including George, didn’t know if they would be able to continue their research, or even have jobs. (Columbia was one of the Trump Administration’s first targets in its crusade against alleged antisemitism on campuses; in May, the university laid off a hundred and eighty researchers after federal-funding cuts.)"

"Bobby has said, "There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective." Bobby probably doesn’t remember the millions of people who were paralyzed or killed by polio before the vaccine was available. My dad, who grew up in New York City in the nineteen-forties and fifties, does remember. Recently, I asked him what it was like when he got the vaccine. He said that it felt like freedom."

"My plan, had I not gotten sick, was to write a book about the oceans — their destruction, but also the possibilities they offer. During treatment, I learned that one of my chemotherapy drugs, cytarabine, owes its existence to an ocean animal: a sponge that lives in the Caribbean Sea, Tectitethya crypta. This discovery was made by scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, who first synthesized the drug in 1959, and who almost certainly relied on government funding, the very thing that Bobby has already cut. I won't write about cytarabine. I won’t find out if we were able to harness the power of the oceans, or if we let them boil and turn into a garbage dump. My son knows that I am a writer and that I write about our planet. Since I've been sick, I remind him a lot, so that he will know that I was not just a sick person."

"I let the memories come and go. So many of them are from my childhood that I feel as if I'm watching myself and my kids grow up at the same time. Sometimes I trick myself into thinking I'll remember this forever, I'll remember this when I'm dead. Obviously, I won't. But since I don't know what death is like and there's no one to tell me what comes after it, I'll keep pretending. I will keep trying to remember."

"Our beliefs don't make us better people. Our actions make us better people."