“No one emerges from a troubled childhood without the battle scars to prove it. It is amazing that we fare as well as we do.”

“ Inevitably, if we are to grow and change as adults, we must gradually learn to confront the challenges, paradoxes, problems and painful reality of an insecure world.”

“Kids grow up in troubled homes thinking that they have the power to change their parents. Over time, they realize that they are mistaken.”

“Many people feel like they were born into the wrong family. Nevertheless, adults must take responsiblity for the pain of the past and create a productive life in the present.”

“No one can play a game alone. One cannot be human by oneself. There is no selfhood where there is no community. We do not relate to others as the persons we are; we are who we are in relating to others. Simultaneously the others with whom we are in relation are themselves in relation. We cannot relate to anyone who is not also relating to us. Our social existence has, therefore, an inescapably fluid character... this ceaseless change does not mean discontinuity; rather change is itself the very basis of our continuity as persons.”

“We are playful when we engage others at the level of choice, when there is no telling in advance where our relationship with them will come out-- when, in fact, no one has an outcome to be imposed on the relationship, apart from the decision to continue it.”

“In attempting to say who Jesus is, the best we can do is to utter words provoked by the collective attempts to do so over the centuries-- a choral work we cannot possibly translate back into a few phrases, any more than we can assume that a concert is adequately described by its listing in the program, or that a painting is interchangeable with its title. Reading the program or the museum's catalogue, we have no notion of what actually was performed or displayed. We can extend the metaphor: a literal reading of the Bible amounts to little more than what we learn from a concert program, or even the score. It is the symphonic whole that bears the meaning that nothing less can remotely capture.”