And in that line now was a whiskered old man, with a linen cap and a crooked nose, who waited in a place called the Stardust Band Shell to share his part of the secret of heaven: that each affects the other and the other affects the next, and the world is full of stories, but the stories are all one.

sometimes what you miss the most is the way a loved one made you feel about yourself.

I never hear anything about education. Education - I guess it's just not sexy enough. And everybody claims to love their children and our children are the most important thing, but if that's the case, how come we never hear more about education as an election issue?

All these people that you meet or I meet, there's not a prayer in hell that they're ever going to run for office or major office because if they're that smart, they're also smart enough to know they don't want to take everything that they've built up and have it torn apart by a sensationalized media that's so hungry for any kind of salacious detail that they'll make that the emphasis of the person's life. And then all of sudden, 50, 60 years of hard work and accomplishment go out the window.

I like myself better when I'm with you.

Parents rarely let go of their children, so children let go of them. They move on. They move away. The moments that used to define them - a mother's approval, a father's nod - are covered by moments of their own accomplishments. It is not until much later, as the skin sags and the heart weakens, that children understand; their stories, and all their accomplishments, sit atop the stories of their mothers and fathers, stones upon stones, beneath the waters of their lives.

Everyone is in such a hurry. People haven’t found meaning in their lives, so they’re running all the time looking for it. They think the next car, the next house, the next job. Then they find those things are empty, too, and they keep running. Once you start running, it’s hard to slow yourself down.