“Somebody says that a student is down here at BYU and he's a member of the church, but he's a mess. And I say, "Yes, I agree. But you ought to see him what the fellow would be like if it weren't for the Church." And that's what the gospel does. It takes all of us with our faults and makes us better. It's a wonderful thing, and there isn't anything like the gospel. If we can live close to it and approach, at least, the life of the Savior in a kind of way that we put other people's interests before our own and in general try to be helpful, we can have a heaven on earth, and life will be a wonderful thing.”

“We are all victims of what is done to us. We can either use that as an excuse for failure, knowing that if we fail it isn't really our fault, or we can say, 'I want something better than that, I deserve something better than that, and i'm going to try to make myself a life worth living.”

“It’s not enough to say we believe and that we love Him; we must be found possessed with His kind of love for others at that last day. It is not necessary for us to lay down our life for others as he did, but like the Savior, we should bless the lives of others by giving of what our life is made up of–our time, our talents, our means, and ourselves.”

“...all I'm saying is that worrying about it isn't going to fix anything. The only thing we can do is keep on with our own small thing and try hard to be good and to make life better, and know that if it all ends tomorrow that we were at least happy.”

“My husband is my most ruthless critic... sometimes he will say, 'It's been said better before.' Of course it has. It's all been said better before. If I thought I had to say it better than anybody else, I'd never start. Better or worse is immaterial. The thing is that it has to be said; by me; ontologically. We each have to say it, to say it our own way. Not of our own will, but as it comes out through us. Good or bad, great or little: that isn't what human creation is about. It is that we have to try; to put it down in pigment, or words, or musical notations, or we die.”

“Those who find no humor in faith are probably those who find the church a refuge for their own black way of looking at life, although I think many of us find the church a refuge for a lot of our personality faults. Those of us, for example, who never learned to dance feel that the church is an ideal place for us if we can find a church that doesn't believe in dancing. Then we can get away with never having learned how to dance. You can carry this in all sorts of directions and see that the church is a refuge for what is really a 'flaw' in your own makeup.”