I don't hold to the idea that God causes suffering and crisis. I just know that those things come along and God uses them. We think life should be a nice, clean ascending line. But inevitably something wanders onto the scene and creates havoc with the nice way we've arranged life to fall in place.

Empathy is the most mysterious transaction that the human soul can have, and its accessible to all of us, but we have to give ourselves the opportunity to identify, to plunge ourselves in a story where we see the world from the bottom up or through anothers eyes or heart.

If you need something from somebody always give that person a way to hand it to you.

It only meant that my natural inclination was to draw my "energy" from within instead of seeking it outside myself, plus my mom was an introvcert, and so were a lot of normal people. The problem was I was shy on top of that. And we all know how the world loves a shy introvert.

I wanted to know what happened when two people felt it. Would it divide the hurt in two, make it lighter to bear, the way feeling someone's joy seemed to double it?

When it's time to die, go ahead and die, and when it's time to live, live. Don't sort-of-maybe live, but live like you're going all out, like you're not afraid.

I watched him, filled with tenderness and ache, wondering what it was that connected us. Was it the wounded places down inside people that sought each other out, that bred a kind of love between them?