People are hungry for stories. It's part of our very being. Storytelling is a form of history, of immortality too. It goes from one generation to another. -Studs Terkel

No matter what the issues are, it has to be handled at the grassroots. When you take part in something, even though that movement may lose, the juices start flowing and you feel you count. You count. Well, that's pretty important.

But once you become active in something, something happens to you. You get excited and suddenly you realize you count.

I want, of course, peace, grace, and beauty. How do you do that? You work for it.

You happen to be talking to an agnostic. You know what an agnostic is? A cowardly atheist.

Think of what's stored in an 80- or a 90-year-old mind. Just marvel at it. You've got to get out this information, this knowledge, because you've got something to pass on. There'll be nobody like you ever again. Make the most of every molecule you've got as long as you've got a second to go.

Work is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying.