"Depression weighs you down like a rock in a river. You don't stand a chance. You can fight and pray and hope you have the strength to swim, but sometimes, you have to let yourself sink. Because you'll never know true happiness until someone or something pulls you back out of that river--and you'll never believe it until you realize it was you, yourself who saved you."

"Happiness has to do with your mindset, not with outside circumstance."

"I consider myself a stained-glass window. And this is how I live my life. Closing no doors and covering no windows; I am the multi-colored glass with light filtering through me, in many different shades. Allowing light to shed and fall into many many hues. My job is not to direct anything, but only to filter into many colors. My answer is destiny and my guide is joy. And there you have me."

"Write it on your heart you are the most beautiful soul of the Universe. Realize it, honor it and celebrate the life."

"I like to believe that you don't need to reach a certain goal to be happy. I prefer to think that happiness is always there, and that when things don't go the way we might like them to, it's a sign from above that something even better is right around the corner."

"Cake is happiness! If you know the way of the cake, you know the way of happiness! If you have a cake in front of you, you should not look any further for joy!"

"Whenever I see an ambulance, I like to think there is a baby being born, rather than a death."

"Be happy -- if you're not even happy, what's so good about surviving?"

"Live your life. Be happy as you can be, let go of the things that don't matter, and fight."

"An entire life spent reading would have fulfilled my every desire; I already knew that at the age of seven. The texture of the world is painful, inadequate; unalterable, or so it seems to me. Really, I believe that an entire life spent reading would have suited me best. Such a life has not been granted me..."

"The trick. . .is to find the balance between the bright colors of humor and the serious issues of identity, self-loathing, and the possibility for intimacy and love when it seems no longer possible or, sadder yet, no longer necessary."

"The most important thing is this: to be able at any moment to be free to choose a life that makes you happy."

"Her happiness floated like waves of ocean along the coast of her life. She found lyrics of her life in his arms but she never sung her song."

"I may never be happy, but tonight I am content. Nothing more than an empty house, the warm hazy weariness from a day spent setting strawberry runners in the sun, a glass of cool sweet milk, and a shallow dish of blueberries bathed in cream. When one is so tired at the end of a day one must sleep, and at the next dawn there are more strawberry runners to set, and so one goes on living, near the earth. At times like this I'd call myself a fool to ask for more..."

"Happiness is a state of mind, a choice, a way of living; it is not something to be achieved, it is something to be experienced."

"Personally I am very pessimistic. But when, for instance, one of my staff has a baby you can't help but bless them for a good future. Because I can't tell that child, 'Oh, you shouldn't have come into this life.' And yet I know the world is heading in a bad direction. So with those conflicting thoughts in mind, I think about what kind of films I should be making."

"You know, people ask me. They say 'Dan, three years later do you really want to be drawing cat whiskers on your face?' but they don't understand. The cat whiskers, they come from within."

"Every time I thought I was being rejected from something good, I was actually being re-directed to something better."

"Come clean with a child heartLaugh as peaches in the summer windLet rain on a house roof be a songLet the writing on your facebe a smell of apple orchards on late June."

"When you are living the best version of yourself, you inspire others to live the best versions of themselves."

"If you are not the hero of your own story, then you're missing the whole point of your humanity."

"I'm going to enjoy every second, and I'm going to know I'm enjoying it while I'm enjoying it. Most people don't live; they just race. They are trying to reach some goal far away on the horizon, and in the heat of the going they get so breathless and panting that they lose sight of the beautiful, tranquil country they are passing through; and then the first thing they know, they are old and worn out, and it doesn't make any difference whether they've reached the goal or not."