“Most of us find our own voices only after we’ve sounded like a lot of other people.”

“Few people...have had much training in listening. The training of most oververbalized professional intellectuals is in the opposite direction. Living in a competitive culture, most of us are most of the time chiefly concerned with getting our own views across, and we tend to find other people's speeches a tedious interruption of the flow of our own ideas.”

“Our hearts are like starfish, regenerating what we’ve lost. We move forward, regroup, reconfigure; people find ways to be happy.”

“In large part, we are teachers precisely because we remember what it was like to be a student. Someone inspired us. Someone influenced us. Or someone hurt us. And we’ve channeled that joy (or pain) into our own unique philosophies on life and learning and we’re always looking for an opportunity to share them—with each other, our students, parents, or in our communities.”

“Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots - places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play.”

“Sometimes I think there are only so many opportunities . . . to get together with someone. And we’ve both screwed up so many times”—my voice grows quiet—“that we’ve missed our chance.”