The timing of death, like the ending of a story, gives a changed meaning to what preceded it.
We are not what we know but what we are willing to learn.
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.
Fear is not a good teacher. The lessons of fear are quickly forgotten.
Every loss recapitulates earlier losses, but every affirmation of identity echoes earlier moments of clarity.
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.
The caretaking has to be done. “Somebody’s got to be the mommy.” Individually, we underestimate this need, and as a society we make inadequate provision for it. Women take up the slack, making the need invisible as we step in to fill it.
Goals too clearly defined can become blinkers.
The human species thinks in metaphors and learns through stories.
The capacity to combine commitment with skepticism is essential to democracy.
Human beings do not eat nutrients, they eat food.
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.
What would it be like to have not only color vision but culture vision, the ability to see the multiple worlds of others.
The family is changing not disappearing. We have to broaden our understanding of it, look for the new metaphors.
When parents die, all of the partings of the past are reevoked with the realization that this time they will not return...
Often continuity is visible only in retrospect.
Solutions to problems often depend upon how they’re defined.
We do not need to understand other people and their customs fully to interact with them and learn in the process; it is making the effort to interact without knowing all the rules, improvising certain situations, which allows us to grow.
In many ways, constancy is an illusion.