“shame should be reserved for the things we choose to do, not the circumstances that life puts on us”

“The secret is to keep adding voices, adding ideas, and moving things around as you put together your life. If you’re lucky, putting together your life is a process that will last through every single day you’re alive.”

“I believe, in my better moments, that there is a plan and things go not the way we want them to but the way they should.”

“Reading fiction not only develops our imagination and creativity, it gives us the skills to be alone. It gives us the ability to feel empathy for people we've never met, living lives we couldn't possibly experience for ourselves, because the book puts us inside the character's skin.”

“He used to say we all had a compass inside of us and what we needed to do was to find it and to follow it.”

“The question is whether or not you choose to disturb the world around you, or if you choose to let it go on as if you had never arrived.”

“What now is not just a panic-stricken question tossed into a dark unknown. What now can also be our joy. It is a declaration of possibility, of promise, of chance. It acknowledges that our future is open, that we may well do more than anyone expected of us, that at every point in our development we are still striving to grow.”