“I think I was always interested in the larger world, even as a kid, and my experiences as a journalist only heightened that interest. Covering conflict, I learned that though leaders often try to create a sense of "us" and "them," the differences are not that delineated. I often felt like it was a whole bunch of "us," with some of "them" scattered around. That made me feel that the borders we draw around ourselves are often artificial.”

“Often, what makes certain people particularly attractive to us is that when we are really with them we experience ourselves as being more whole.”

“Books can only reveal us to ourselves, and as often as they do us this service we lay them aside.”

“I think now that is the nature of hymns-they make us want to repeat them...they are a part of any service, and often the only part of a funeral service, that makes us feel everything is acceptable.”

“Before that experience, I had often felt the kind of alone that comes from the suspicion that you are not only genetically different from those around you, but different in your very soul...[then] I was a different kind of alone. I was alone and ashamed of myself...it was no one's fault but mine.”

“I know now that we never get over great losses; we absorb them, and they carve us into different, often kinder, creatures.”