All other days have either disappeared into darkness and oblivion or not yet emerged from it. Today is the only day there is.

Being a good steward of your pain. . . . It involves being alive to your life. It involves taking the risk of being open, of reaching out, of keeping in touch with the pain as well as the joy of what happens because at no time more than at a painful time do we live out of the depths of who we are instead of out of the shallows.

Like a house in the rain, books were havens of permanence and protection from whatever it was that as a child I needed protection from.

A miracle is when the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. A miracle is when one plus one equals a thousand.

Toleration is often just indifference in disguise.

But it has been my experience that the risks are faroutweighed by the rewards, chief of which is when you speak to strangers as though they are friends, more often than not, if only for as long as the encounter lasts, they become friends, and if in the process they also think of you as a little peculiar, who cares?

the story of any one of us is in some measure the story of us all