Hope is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky.... hope is an ax you break down doors with in an emergency.

Sometimes it seems that the fate of the world is decided entirely in the ether of electronic communications and corporate backroom deals.

What's your story? It's all in the telling. Stories are compasses and architecture; we navigate by them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice. To love someone is to put yourself in their place, we say, which is to put yourself in their story, or figure out how to tell yourself their story. Which means that a place is a story, and stories are geography, and empathy is first of all an act of imagination, a storyteller's art, and then a way of traveling from here to there.

Sometimes a few passionate people change the world; sometimes they start a mass movement and millions do.

The art is not one of forgetting but letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss.

The magic of the street is the mingling of the errand and the epiphany.

Politics is pervasive. Everything is political and the choice to be "apolitical" is usually just an endorsement of the status quo and the unexamined life.