I've been lucky enough to work with extraordinary teachers along the way, and I'm excited to share what I've learned with graduate students at SNHU. I'm just as excited for what I'll learn from them.

Empathy isn’t just something that happens to us — a meteor shower of synapses firing across the brain — it’s also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves.

No trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds. Out of wounds and across boundaries.

The pain is what you make of it. You have to find something in it that yields. I understood my guiding imperative as: keep bleeding, but find some love in the blood.

Commonality doesn't inoculate against hurt.

When bad things happened to other people, I imagined them happening to me. I didn’t know if this was empathy or theft.

Imagining someone else's pain with too much surety can be as damaging as failing to imagine it.

I'm happy not knowing. Most of the time (except when I'm a neurotic mess about uncertainty) I feel glad that the horizon is a mystery.

I've been thinking so much about writing as a gift to readers - and how newness of subject (place or topic or person) is one of the biggest gifts at our disposal.

Empathy requires knowing that you know nothing.

I needed people to deliver my feelings back to me in a form that was legible. Which is a superlative kind of empathy to seek, or to supply: an empathy that rearticulates more clearly what it's shown.

If everything else were still the same, he'd have felt Zee's absence like a gaping hole. But if he could continue to reconfigure his entire life, there would be no missing place where Zee had been.

Keep asking yourself, 'What kind of a company would my company be if everyone in it was just like me?'

Continuous learning is the minimum requirement for success in any field.

Everybody acts like I'm nuts. I'm not nuts I just want to feel it all.

stoicism is the fundamental characteristic of the French.

That's the true spirit of Christmas; people being helped by people other than me.

I just want to put a feeling in all the music I make. It's a part of me. It's a story. I'm always and I'll always be working on it.

Old habits die hard, I guess. If you dont kick them, they kick you.

There's a lot of vitriolic ranting out there, but there are literally hundreds of critics on the web who care deeply about film and having something to say about it.

Never settle for average.