So many bad things have happened to them that they can't trust the good things. They have to shove them away before someone can get it back.

I love the most the students with troubled lives.

I am not a smart man, particularly, but one day, at long last, I stumbled from the dark woods of my own, and my family's, and my country's past, holding in my hands these truths: that love grows from the rich loam of forgiveness; that mongrels make good dogs; that the evidence of God exists in the roundness of things. This much, at least, I've figured out. I know this much is true.

But what are our stories if not the mirrors we hold up to our fears?

If you risked love, it took you wherever you wanted to go. If you repressed it, you ended up unhappy.

Connecticut is in my blood.

I cried because I had no shoes. Then I met a man who had no feet.