We are not what we know but what we are willing to learn.

The family is changing not disappearing. We have to broaden our understanding of it, look for the new metaphors.

Human beings tend to regard the conventions of their own societies as natural, often as sacred.

In many ways, constancy is an illusion. After all, our ancestors were immigrants, many of them moving on every few years; today we are migrants in time. Unless teachers can hold up a model of lifelong learning and adaptation, graduates are likely to find themselves trapped into obsolescence as the world changes around them. 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.

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.

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

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