“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.”

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.

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

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.

The Christian tradition was passed on to me as a great rich mixture, a bouillabaisse of human imagination and wonder brewed from the richness of individual lives.

Most higher education is devoted to affirming the traditions and origins of an existing elite and transmitting them to new members.

Caring can be learned by all human beings, can be worked into the design of every life, meeting an individual need as well as a pervasive need in society.

The critical question about regret is whether experience led to growth and new learning. Some people seem to keep on making the same mistakes, while others at least make new ones. Regret and remorse can be either paralyzing or inspiring.

Improvisation and new learning are not private processes; they are shared with others at every age. We are called to join in a dance whose steps must be learned along the way, so it is important to attend and respond. Even in uncertainty, we are responsible for our steps.

There are few things as toxic as a bad metaphor. You can’t think without metaphors.

God will answer all our questions in one way and one way only. Namely, by showing us more of his Son.

A city is a place where there is no need to wait for next week to get the answer to a question, to taste the food of any country, to find new voices to listen to and familiar ones to listen to again.

In the first English class I attended, Prof. E. H. Elliot, addressing me, asked if I really belonged to the Junior B. A. class, and I had to answer him in the affirmative. He then proceeded to inquire how old I was.

I don’t wear my political feelings on my sleeve. However, if I’m asked, I will answer honestly.

Ask yourself the secret of your success. Listen to your answer, and practice it.

I do know this: God does answer your prayers, but it’s not always in the way you expect.

God answers prayers, but he doesn’t always answer it your way.

You don’t want a million answers as much as you want a few forever questions.