The dead made this world. We didn't make it. They made the poetry and the songs and the customs.

The French still offer Sartre and Derrida rather than Pascal.

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.

In ordinary life, a mentor can guide a young man through various disciplines, helping to bring him out of boyhood into manhood; and that in turn is associated not with body building, but with building and emotional body capable of containing more than one sort of ecstasy.

Grief is the doorway to a man's feelings.

I think more and more people are recognizing how much adults and elders are actually needed. That's a gift of the sibling society.

The lead either forges an instant connection with the reader, or the package fails.