"Music is my shining light, my favorite thing in the world. T get me to stop doing it for one second would be difficult!"

"I think I first realized I wanted to be in country music and be an artist when I was 10. And I started dragging my parents to festivals, and fairs, and karaoke contests, and I did that for about a year before I came to Nashville for the first time. I was 11 and I had this demo CD of me singing Dixie Chicks and Leanne Rimes songs."

"My mom and I have always been really close. She's always been the friend that was always there. There were times when, in middle school and junior high, I didn't have a lot of friends. But my mom was always my friend. Always."

"I remember straightening my hair because I wanted to be like everybody else, and now the fact that anybody would emulate what I do? It's just funny."

"Value people on their potential, not on their history."

"Skepticism is a virtue in history as well as in philosophy."

"To love deeply is to give someone the power to heal what words cannot reach. A lesson woven into the fabric of human history — an essential principle for the reflective life."

"The 20th century was a test bed for big ideas - fascism, communism, the atomic bomb."