Punishment cannot heal spirits, can only break them.

The injunction that we should love our neighbors as ourselves means to us equally that we should love ourselves as we love our neighbors.

We learn best to listen to our own voices if we are listening at the same time to other women-whose stories, for all our differences, turn out, if we listen well, to be our stories also.

People who attack others need rationalizations for doing so. We undermine those rationalizations.

It is not as mirrors reflect us but, rather, as our dreams do, that movies most truly reveal the times. If the dreams we have been dreaming provide a sad picture of us, it should be remembered that - like that first book of Dante's Comedy - they show forth only one region of the psyche. Through them we can read with a peculiar accuracy the fears and confusions that assail us - we can read, in caricature, the Hell in which we are bound. But we cannot read the best hopes of the time.

This is the heart of my argument: We can put more pressure on the antagonist for whom we show human concern.

The longer we listen to one another - with real attention - the more commonality we will find in all our lives. That is, if we are careful to exchange with one another life stories and not simply opinions.