I don't do a lot of top-down teaching.

Wholeness does not mean perfection: it means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life.

Community is a place where the connections felt in our hearts make themselves known in the bonds between people, and where the tuggings and pullings of those bonds keep opening our hearts.

I now know myself to be a person of weakness and strength, liability and giftedness, darkness and light. I now know that to be whole means to reject none of it but to embrace all of it.

One of the hardest things we must do sometimes is to be present to another person's pain without trying to "fix" it, to simply stand respectfully at the edge of that person's mystery and misery.

We are here not only to transform the world but also to be transformed.

Self-care is never a selfish act - it is only good stewardship of the only gift I have, the gift I was put on earth to offer others.

Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you.

Community doesn't just create abundance - community is abundance. If we could learn that equation from the world of nature, the human world might be transformed.

At its deepest level, I think teaching is about bringing people into communion with each other, with yourself as the teacher, and with the subject you are teaching.

Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am.

Am I a man of great wisdom? Hardly! Even when a simple person brings me a question, my mind goes utterly blank, I just thrash it out until I’ve exhausted every possibility.

There is no enjoying the possession of anything valuable unless one has someone to share it with

Like the darkness of night, difficult times don’t last.

I come from a filmmaking tradition and a storytelling background. So somehow I've emerged like a mutant who can straddle both worlds.

I think everything obviously comes from experience of some kind. It's more about if you closely adhere to that experience or if you extrapolate from it.

Whenever we dig down into the achievements of a creative artist, we invariably trace them to the beginning of all beginnings: labour.

[A]lways keep a-hold of Nurse For fear of finding something worse

It's always a really great thing to have an actor that does make you want to up your game. It naturally motivates you to do and try things that maybe you wouldn't necessarily do or try.

It's almost like a sign of mental illness to base your self-worth on the opinions of complete strangers, you know?

Most poetry just confounds me. I really want to like it, but I can't help thinking it's a hoax. (p. 24)