Of any stopping place in life, it is good to ask whether it will be a good place from which to go on as well as a good place to remain.

We do not need to understand other people and their customs fully to interact with them and learn in the process; it is making the effort to interact without knowing all the rules, improvising certain situations, which allows us to grow.

Learning to savor the vertigo of doing without answers or making do with fragmentary ones opens up the pleasures of recognizing and playing with patterns, finding coherence within complexity, sharing within multiplicity.

The caretaking has to be done. "Somebody's got to be the mommy." Individually, we underestimate this need, and as a society we make inadequate provision for it. Women take up the slack, making the need invisible as we step in to fill it.

When parents die, all of the partings of the past are reevoked with the realization that this time they will not return.

A suprising number of physicians manage to continue to care about persons even after the rigors of medical training.

There are few things as toxic as a bad metaphor. You can't think without metaphors.