I have spent many years trying to recover a common language, one that can cross the distance between people.

An elder is someone who understands that the world belongs to the dead.

I have daughters and I have sons./When one of them lays a hand/On my shoulder, shining fish/Turn suddenly in the deep sea.

The French still offer Sartre and Derrida rather than Pascal.

To be wild is not to be crazy or psychotic. True wildness is a love of nature, a delight in silence, a voice free to say spontaneous things, and an exuberant curiosity in the face of the unknown.

The distance between the adolescent and the true adult is about five thousand miles, but the distance between the adult and the elder is almost as large.

To me, the hope lies in adults forgetting about their retirement and turning toward the adolescents and helping pull the adolescents over that mysterious line drawn on the ground into adulthood. If we don't do that, the adolescents are going to stay exactly where they are for the next 30 or 40 years.