Quotes from Anderson Cooper

A few central myths appear again and again in Americans' popular imagination: that success is available to anyone who is willing to work hard, for example, and that success is worthier of celebration if it is achieved without help.

Money gives you independence; but when you start chasing it, it is never enough.

Someone recently said to me that it is easier to be clever than it is to be kind, and I think that is very true. So I add to my list of regrets the times I have not been kind, choosing instead to be clever, usually at someone else's expense.

Health is your most treasured gift. As long as you have it, you are independent, master of yourself. Illness grabs the soul. You plunge in and out of hope, fearing you will never recover. All that I have been, all that I am, all that I might become no longer exist. I am alone. Nothing can distract from the truth of this finality. How

The benefit of thinking you will die at fifty is that it can spur you to accomplish a lot of things at a young age, which is what I have attempted to do, but now the prospect of living longer makes me uncertain about the plans I've made.

At the very least," she'd written to me once, "when we die we will be as if asleep, in the same place we were before birth, so why fear death? Scattered on the wind, unaware as we were before we came into this world, with no memory of any of it.

The Vanderbilt story somehow manages to be both unique and also, deeply, universally American.

We are not meant always to be happy, and who would want to be? Happiness would become meaningless if it were a constant state. If you accept that, then you will not be surprised when something bad occurs, you will not gnash your teeth and ask, Why me? Why has this happened to me? It has happened to you because that is the nature of things. No one escapes. The rainbow comes and goes. Enjoy it while it lasts. Don't be surprised by its departure, rejoice when it returns.

If you needed anything, all you had to do was say, 'Mom, I need this,' and my mom would be at my house with it," she says, crying. "And now it's like, if I need something, who do I call?

Does one ever know what another person is really like, even someone very close to us? Do we know what we are like ourselves? What we are today may not be what we are tomorrow.

They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand.

is a difference between being open to constructive criticism and letting jealous strangers say cruel things to you that make you feel bad about yourself. As

The world has many edges, and all of us dangle from them by a very delicate thread. The key is not to let go.

Perhaps someday it will be pleasant to remember even this. VIRGIL

Remember, whenever money is involved it brings out horrific things in people. It has the power not only to split families apart but to destroy the foundation of one's life. Never lose sight of this. Take time and be certain you place your trust in those whose interest and goals mirror your own.

Hard to imagine that the man who made the Gilded Age according to his whims and who died on the cusp of the twentieth century had a great-grandfather born the same year as the Salem witch trials, but such are the long spans of generations.

whatever problem you have with someone, project yourself into the other person and see it from their point of view. When you do this, good and evil shuffle into patterns and you are capable of forgiving trespasses. When you understand from whence the good or evil came, and the other person's actions or motivations, only then can you forgive and let it go. Most children believe that

That's the thing about suicide. Try as you might to remember how a person lived his life, you always end up thinking about how he ended it.

From the time we were little, you treated us as if our ideas mattered.

How can my body betray me when there is so much still to be done? You see, it isn't age itself that betrays you; it is your body, and with its deterioration goes your power. You end up obsessed, entirely focused on your health, paying attention to every nuance, every ache and pain. Instead of working or living your life, you waste your time on appointments with doctors.

The money I inherited never belonged to me.

Gilded sin is so much more interesting than ragged sin," she reflected. "Scandal dressed in ermine and purple is much more salacious than scandal in overalls or a kitchen apron.

I began going through dozens of boxes stored away in her apartment and her art studio. They were filled with journals, and documents, and letters. She saved everything. Handwritten notes from her aunt Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and schoolbooks my grandfather Reginald Vanderbilt doodled in as a child. I found old wills and financial records, and as I read the contents of these files stained by time and mold, I began to hear the voices of those people I never knew.

Conchita Clossen in Edith Wharton's unfinished novel of transatlantic husband hunting, The Buccaneers.