Acknowledgment--being seen and heard and witnessed inside the truth about one's own life--is the only real medicine of grief.

Every loss is valid. And every loss is not the same. You can't flatten the landscape of grief and say that everything is equal. It isn't.

True comfort in grief is in acknowledging the pain, not in trying to make it go away. Companionship, not correction, is the way forward.

Some things cannot be fixed. They can only be carried.

When you try to take someone's pain away from them, you don't make it better. You just tell them it's not OK to talk about their pain.

Your daily choices and actions should be rational and productive

I was made for action movies.

People's attention spans are a little shorter these days. Same thing with food and movies.

I would rather be a member of this [Afrikan] race than a Greek in the time of Alexander, a Roman in the Augustan period, or Anglo-Saxon in the nineteenth century.

As a kid, I sensed history going on all around me, but the basic thrust of it didn't move me.

Changing the world doesn't happen all at once. It isn't a big bang. It's an evolution, the sum of a billion tiny sparks. And some of those sparks will have to come from you.

Everything popular is wrong.

I didn’t want to know that the monster that lived under your bed when you were a kid not only really is there but used to have a few beers with your dad.

[A]nti-Semitism was rife in almost all varieties of socialism.

We must believe, but we can't believe. Perhaps this is the tragedy that some of us see in Obama: a change we can believe in and the crushing realisation that nothing will change.