“How can poetry be something we study, but also something that makes us cry?”

“How we prepare our food, how we consume our food really makes a difference in how our food satisfies us and shapes the role we give food in our lives. Is it something we stuff in to satisfy an urge or something we savor to feed us physically and sustain us spiritually?”

“That's one of the things books do. They help us talk. But they also give us something we can all talk about when we don't want to talk about ourselves.”

“Before we can begin to see the cross as something done for us, we have to see it as something done by us.”

“Pity can purge us of hostility and arouse feelings of identification with the characters, but it can also be a consoling reassurance which leads us to believe that we have understood, and that, in pitying, we have even done something to right a wrong.”

“The winds that sometimes take something we love, are the same that bring us something we learn to love. Therefore we should not cry about something that was taken from us, but, yes, love what we have been given. Because what is really ours is never gone forever.”