We learn, grow and become compassionate and generous as much through exile as homecoming, as much through loss as gain, as much through giving things away as in receiving what we believe to be our due.

Without the compassionate understanding of the fear and trepidation that lie behind courageous speech, we are bound only to our arrogance.

Being a good parent will necessarily break our hearts as we watch a child grow and eventually choose their own way, even through many of the same heartbreaks we have traversed.

The marvelous thing about a good question is that it shapes our identity as much by the asking as it does by the answering.

A good poem brims with reflected beauty and even a bracing, beautiful ugliness. At the center of our lives, in the midst of the busyness and the forgetting, is a story that makes sense when everything extraneous has been taken away.

Giving in order to get is not giving.