Frank Delaney Quotes

I'm not opposed to reaching out Hispanics. I'm all for reaching out to everybody! As Americans. Not as members of groups, and not treating people as though they're legitimate members of some grievance group, but reaching out to them as human beings.

People are still people no matter how you cut it.

Stories helped me unite parts of my existence that might otherwise have seemed irrevocably split by geography and time. And stories helped me find a future in which I, such a mongrel, could be comfortable.

Too many of us still believe our differences define us.

When I talk to another Afghan I am his or her equal and that moves me to tears.

Whatever I talk about onstage is just my story. My fan base is broad... We all have the same mom; it's just that ours has an accent.

Being an outsider is the one thing we all have in common.

No, not under the vault of another sky, not under the shelter of other wings. I was with my people then, there where my people were doomed to be.

Be skeptical, but not as a social position, not claiming to be so intelligent that you cannot believe what other people say. It's not about being right and making everybody else wrong. No, you are skeptical because you know without a doubt that everybody lives in their own story, and in their story they have their own truth. But it's only truth in their mind, just as your truth is only truth in your mind, and nobody else's.

everybody has a story to tell

When we define ourselves, when I define myself, the place in which I am like you and the place in which I am not like you, I'm not excluding you from the joining - I'm broadening the joining.

People aren't trees, so it is false when they speak of roots.

I'm of the people in the bar and the people in my stories. They are my tribe.

How can I expect readers to know who I am if I do not tell them about my family, my friends, the relationships in my life? Who am I if not where I fit in the world, where I fit in the lives of the people dear to me?

The arts and humanities define who we are as a people. That is their power -- to remind us of what we each have to offer, and what we all have in common. To help us understand our history and imagine our future. To give us hope in the moments of struggle and to bring us together when nothing else will.

Before I let myself question my loyalty to my people, I'm quitting music. I didn't do this to be by myself.

When you identify yourself with a group of people or a set of ideas, aren't you separating yourself?

You've got to trust the ground you're standing on and the work you've done in telling your story. The goal should be to bring those thousands of people - viewers - together and make them one. When you feel that happening, it's usually in silence, not applause or laughter.

I don't see people as groups, I see them as individuals.

Then I tell my own story. The two things that people really need to transform is language to understand their experience and to know they're not alone. It's the combination of the researcher-storyteller part.

In trying to express only those aspects of ourselves that we believe will guarantee us the acceptance of others, we suppress some of our most valuable and interesting features and sentence ourselves to a life of reenacting the same outworn scripts. Reclaiming the parts of ourselves that we have relegated to the shadow is the most reliable path to actualizing all of our human potential. Once befriended, our shadow becomes a divine map that—when properly read and followed—reconnects us to the life we were meant to live and the people we were meant to be.

My body is my journal, and my tattoos are my story.

In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers.

The myth is the public domain and the dream is the private myth. If your private myth, your dream, happens to coincide with that of the society, you are in good accord with your group. If it isn't, you've got a long adventure in the dark forest ahead of you.

You have to be really careful to watch out for the difference between banding together, and being grouped together by people who don't understand you.