“What would it be like to have not only color vision but culture vision, the ability to see the multiple worlds of others.”

Goals too clearly defined can become blinkers.

Improvisation can be either a last resort or an established way of evoking creativity.

Of any stopping place in life, it is good to ask whether it will be a good place from which to go on as well as a good place to remain.

Learning to savor the vertigo of doing without answers or making do with fragmentary ones opens up the pleasures of recognizing and playing with patterns, finding coherence within complexity, sharing within multiplicity.

Fluidity and discontinuity are central to the reality in which we live.

We are not what we know but what we are willing to learn.

Sharing is sometimes more demanding than giving.

Insight, I believe, refers to the depth of understanding that comes by setting experiences, yours and mine, familiar and exotic, new and old, side by side, learning by letting them speak to one another.

The family is changing not disappearing. We have to broaden our understanding of it, look for the new metaphors.

Monotony and repetition are characteristic of many parts of life, but these do not become sources of conscious discomfort until novelty and entertainment are built up as positive experiences.

Worlds can be found by a child and an adult bending down and looking together under the grass stems or at the skittering crabs in a tidal pool.

The capacity to combine commitment with skepticism is essential to democracy.

When parents die, all of the partings of the past are reevoked with the realization that this time they will not return.

The past empowers the present, and the sweeping footsteps leading to this present mark the pathways to the future.

A suprising number of physicians manage to continue to care about persons even after the rigors of medical training.

In many ways, constancy is an illusion.

As a person of color, there’s no getting around the reality of its responsibility.

The aquilegia sprinkled on the rocks A scarlet rain; the yellow violet Sat in the chariot of its leaves, the phlox Held spikes of purple flame in meadows wet, And all the streams with vernal-scented reed Were fringed, and streaky bellow of miskodeed.

Aided and abetted by market forces and the laws of supply and demand, he hones his skill to stand up but make sure he’s never counted.

Music is the last true voice of the human spirit. It can go beyond language, beyond age, and beyond color straight to the mind and heart of all people.

People of color, particularly African Americans, feel the stigma more keenly. In a race-conscious society, some don’t want to be perceived as having yet another deficit.

With segregation, with the isolation of the injured and the robbed, comes the concentration of disadvantage.

Blueness doth express trueness.

But the color of a Negro’s skin makes him easily recognizable, makes him suspect, converts him into a defenseless target