“There is a place where we are always alone with our own mortality, where we must simply have something greater than ourselves to hold onto—God or history or politics or literature or a belief in the healing power of love, or even righteous anger.... A reason to believe, a way to take the world by the throat and insist that there is more to this life than we have ever imagined.”

“Where we choose to be, where we choose to be--we have the power to determine that in our lives. We cannot reel time backward or forward, but we can take ourselves to the place that defines our being.”

“The imagination made us human, but being human, becoming more human, is a greater burden than we imagined. We have no choice but to imagine ourselves more human than we are.”

“Where we have reasons for what we believe, we have no need of faith; where we have no reasons, we have lost both our connection to the world and to one another.”

“In this world, where we find ourselves, we need compassion more than anything, I think, or we are all alone.”

“I believe we are more ready to embrace our lives in the here and now when we are able to recognize the continuity between the immanence of God in our world and eternity. Rather than simply waiting to be liberated to another time or place, we are being invited to collaborate in the healing and redemption of our world.”