Some of the choicest blessings of my life have been the close friendships I have experienced over the years. Often, these friendships have been forged in the fires of shared experience.
Most Americans have some experience with nursing homes or other long term care settings, and nearly half have had a family member or close friend in a home in the past three years.
No matter how close to personal experience a story might be, inevitably you are going to get to a part that isn't yours and, actually, whether it happened or not becomes irrelevant. It is all about choosing the right words.
It's hard to conceive of someone who could work for at least a few hours each day for months and years on the same story without it being close enough to their life experience to fuel their commitment.
My poems - I don't even like the sound of that, in a way. Not that anyone else wrote them. But we know that only people who are really close to us care about our personal experience.
Those who believe in God because their experience of life and the facts of nature prove his existence must have led sheltered lives and closed their hearts to the voice of their brothers' blood.
Everything is so chaotic. My nervous system can't handle it. I need my peace, so, every once in a while, while the kids are at school, I lie in bed, close the curtains, watch television and eat food.
Food is so important - it sustains us, it provides a social focal point, and it is fun. I cannot unravel the difference between love in my family and the preparation of food because they are so closely woven.
The first reports of AIDS closely followed the inauguration of President Ronald Reagan, whose 'family values' agenda and alliance with Christian conservatives associated AIDS with deviance and sin.
It seems to me that unless you or someone very close to you has had a bad head injury, you really can't fathom it. You have no concept of what it is all about. It was so difficult for my whole family, not just me.
House Republican leadership have refused to allow a clean minimum wage vote. Close to 15 million Americans will be affected if we did this. Do Republicans really expect a family to live on less than $11,000 a year?
I come from a family of Mississippi sharecroppers just a few generations away from slavery, and I experienced a lot of racism growing up - you can't avoid that if you're a person of color in this country.
I had planned to spend my 40s continuing my public service and starting a family. I thought that by fighting for the people I cared about and loving those close to me, I could leave the world a better place.
My parents were very poor, but we never felt any sense of need or want. It was a very close, loving, tightly-knit family growing up, and I never felt any sense of deprivation or anything like that.
I'd like to find great roles close to home and work on great projects while staying near my family. My family's the most important thing to me right now.
What they say about TV shows is true. You're really a family. You laugh, you fight, you get close, you know? Movies are shorter. They're over quicker. You don't form the same bonds.
The only investable idea I have real confidence in is farming and forestry. My family owns some forest, and now we're closing on a farm. Make the farming more sustainable and the forestry more sustainable, and everyone benefits.
As a child, I was fortunate enough to be close to family members who were - and still are - great storytellers. I was a gullible country boy from Rocky Mount, Virginia, and I believed every folktale they told me, no matter how fantastic.
In dwelling, live close to the ground. In thinking, keep to the simple. In conflict, be fair and generous. In governing, don't try to control. In work, do what you enjoy. In family life, be completely present.
We read that Adam and Methuselah lived so many centuries; at that time, it was the custom to marry in the family - marry as closely as possible - so that the tie of blood might be as strong as it could be made.
The first Superman film took up a huge chunk of our lives, but it was a wonderful time for us. We were young, my daughter was little, we were filming in London for a year, so we became like a close family.
