I don't know if I've ever been in a clique. The older I've gotten, the more I've realized what a true friend really is. So my friendship circle has changed a bit.

Soon I realized that if beauty equalled forgiveness, I was never going to be forgiven.

I realized that it's all really one, that John Lennon was correct. We utilize the music to bring down the walls of Berlin, to bring up the force of compassion and forgiveness and kindness between Palestines, Hebrews. Bring down the walls here in San Diego, Tijuana, Cuba.

When I got to France I realized I didn't know very much about food at all. I'd never had a real cake. I'd had those cakes from cake mixes or the ones that have a lot of baking powder in them. A really good French cake doesn't have anything like that in it - it's all egg power.

You know how you wake up in the morning and sometimes you look gorgeous and other times you look like you got hit by a mack truck? I realized that my mack truck is food. If I have no sugar, yeast or wine, I have no undereye bags and my skin is perfect.

I realized very early the power of food to evoke memory, to bring people together, to transport you to other places, and I wanted to be a part of that.

When I began, I was more of a swing bowler with little pace, but I realized it will be difficult to sustain without the pace, so my fitness has now allowed me maybe an extra yard of pace. That has been the secret of my success.

And before I realized I could do music professionally, my whole plan was to go into finance and become a hedge fund manager.

The more I traveled the more I realized that fear makes strangers of people who should be friends.

I am a living symbol of the white man's fear. I never realized how deeply embedded this fear is until I came to Brandfort.

I decided to make 'Captain America' because I realized I wasn't doing the film because it terrified me. You can't make decisions based on fear.

There are few things more liberating in this life than having your worst fear realized.

I was set free because my greatest fear had been realized, and I still had a daughter who I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became a solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

I always loved working as an actress, but I didn't understand why I couldn't just opt out of being famous. And then I realized you can, and I think I did. And eventually, I came to understand that you can do that and also keep working.

The first time I went to Johnny Depp's house in LA is when I realized what I was getting myself into. I knew he was famous, but I didn't really know what that entailed.

I realized my family was funny, because nobody ever wanted to leave our house.

I woke up one morning thinking about wolves and realized that wolf packs function as families. Everyone has a role, and if you act within the parameters of your role, the whole pack succeeds, and when that falls apart, so does the pack.

I realized that my truest passion was for helping people change through faith in a higher power. That meant, for me, belonging to the church. Using my abilities to bring Christian doctrine to a postmodern world.

I realized that I was afraid to really, really try something, 100%, because I had never reached true failure.

God cannot be realized through the intellect. Intellect can lead one to a certain extent and no further. It is a matter of faith and experience derived from that faith.

I remember when I was 33 or 34, it was devastating because I realized I wasn't a kid anymore. The great thing about 40 was that I really felt like I had life experience and knew what I was doing now.

For my first show at 'SNL', I wrote a Bill Clinton sketch, and during our read-through, it wasn't getting any laughs. This weight of embarrassment came over me, and I felt like I was sweating from my spine out. But I realized, 'Okay, that happened, and I did not die.' You've got to experience failure to understand that you can survive it.

There are many truths of which the full meaning cannot be realized until personal experience has brought it home.

In my late 20s, I realized that I had a very clear social conscience and strong opinions about things like diversity, equality, and education, and while I tried to become more politically literate, I just couldn't catch on. It felt like I had walked into a movie that had already started, and no one would explain what had happened.