One of the hardest things we must do sometimes is to be present to another person's pain without trying to "fix" it, to simply stand respectfully at the edge of that person's mystery and misery.

Connection and connectedness are other words for community and communion.

The deeper our faith, the more doubt we must endure; the deeper our hope, the more prone we are to despair; the deeper our love, the more pain its loss will bring: these are a few of the paradoxes we must hold as human beings. If we refuse to hold them in the hopes of living without doubt, despair, and pain, we also find ourselves living without faith, hope, and love.

I now understand what Nelle Morton meant when she said that one of the great tasks in our time is to "hear people to speech." Behind their fearful silence, our students want to find their voices, speak their voices, have their voices heard. A good teacher is one who can listen to those voices even before they are spoken-so that someday they can speak with truth and confidence.

The inner life of any great thing will be incomprehensible to me until I develop and deepen an inner life of my own.

I will always have fears, but I need not be my fears, for I have other places within myself from which to speak and act.

I'm 67 years old now. I've had a lot of good teachers over the years; and they have been very, very different from one another. They all had passion for what they were doing, but their styles were unique to them as individuals.