I remind myself that my pain is not unique. Everybody suffers.

Surely it's better to love others, however messy and imperfect the involvement, than to allow one's capacity for love to harden.

My greatest solace is my study. If I am deprived of my study, I can become lost, unhappy and unhinged.

I learned a lot from both, initially Jewish and Muslim theologians that had been missing, perhaps from my rather parochial Catholic upbringing.

Storytelling is fine as long as you can encourage people to act on the stories.

Beethoven's string quartets express pain itself; it is not MY pain.

Religions have found that if you behave in a certain way, if you sort of perform certain rituals that expand your mind and make you realize that will make you realize and help you to seguey into transcendence and perform certain acts, adopt a certain lifestyle, you develop new capacities of mind and heart, just like the dancer, or the athlete that make you into a whole human being and principle after one of these disciplines right across the board in all of the faiths is compassion, the ability to feel with the other person.