Trust, which is a virtue, is also a habit, like prayer. It requires exercise. And just as no one can run five miles a day and cede the cardiovascular effects to someone else, no one can trust for us.

We are made of memories and formed by experience. I keep wondering what kind of people we would be, and what kind of world this would be, if when bad things happened we could erase them, or somehow make them sweet.

Though we are made of memories, we live only in the here and now.

Passion kept one fully in the present, so that time became a series of mutually exclusive 'nows.'

Trusting each other is the beginning of a certain secular faith, a faith that allows us to live in families and communities and nations. Democracy, above all other forms of government, requires this faith.

It is essential not only to the souls of painters and poets, who thrive in solitude, but to the rest of us, too--individuals whose canvas is our lives.

A culture that values only what has succeeded before, where the first rule of success is that there must be something 'measured' and counted, is not a culture that will sustain alternatives to market-driven 'creativity.