We need to get back to trusting our emotional rapport with children, to seeing a child's beauty and singling that child out. That's how the mentor system works - you're caught up in the fantasy of another person. Your imagination and their come together.

Character forms a life regardless of how obscurely that life is lived and how little light falls on it from the stars.

Our life is psychological, and the purpose of life is to make psyche of it, to find connections between life and soul.

I don't think anything changes until ideas change.

My goal is to create a therapy of ideas, to try to bring in new ideas so that we can see the same old problems differently.

It's very hard to know what wisdom is

It's a terrible cruelty of predatory capitalism: both parents now have to work. A family has to have two incomes in order to buy the things that are desirable in our culture. So the degradation of motherhood - the sense that motherhood isn't itself a calling - also arises from economic pressure.