Autobiography is a preemptive strike against biographers.

One feels a quickening of the pulse when one crosses a border.

I made the mistake of thinking that if you add up the past, you sum up the future; I forgot how frequently life astonishes us.

All is waiting and all is work; all is change and all is permanence.

I love cloisters, which are the architectural equivalent of a theological concept: perfect freedom within set boundaries.

Our awesome responsibility to ourselves, to our children, and to the future is to create ourselves in the image of goodness, because the future depends on the nobility of our imaginings.

The most painful moral struggles are not those between good and evil, but between the good and the lesser good.