The higher the joy is not the light, it's the reflection. The greater pleasure is not climbing up; it's handing down

I think that most of the action in religion is around the home, is in families, and is in individual lives, and they can go on their own searches, watch their own TV shows, read their own books, form their own groups and discuss it, but that's where the action is - on the home front.

Cancer is a passport to intimacy. It is an invitation, maybe even a mandate, to enter the most vital arenas of human life, the most sensitive and the most frightening, the ones that we never want to go to - but when we do go there, we feel incredibly transformed.

Everybody has heard that family dinner is great for kids. But unfortunately, it doesn't work in many of our lives.

The way to tell a really big story, I think, is to tell a really small story.

When it comes to gender, marriage, family, work, and religion - we once thought of them as being fixed, but they're incredibly fluid. The same is true for love. Love was not something that was originally built between two equal partners in a relationship. It's something that's been hard-earned over time.

When I was growing up, I, like many Jews, cheered what appeared to be the receding of faith from everyday life. The further religion got from our lives the better our lives would get, I thought, because persecution had been such a burden to Jewish families for generations.