Mentoring is a mutuality that requires more than meeting the right teacher: the teacher must meet the right student.

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.

We live beneath many layers. Some are for our protection, and some are for our control.

Time is my estate: to Time I'm heir.

There are conservative people in all colours in America.

Right now I would rank Norway as the largest country in the world, I have never seen anything like it

The human heart is a lonely hunter-but the search for us southerners is more anguished.

A wine shop was open and I went in for some coffee. It smelled of early morning, of swept dust, spoons in coffee-glasses and the wet circles left by wine glasses.

I was a class clown. At 12, I was definitely clowning. I was making all the jokes. But I was smart, so the teachers didn't know what to do with me.

I would like to sound like James Mason. I reckon if I'd had a better voice I could have been prime minister. It is the most irritating voice in public life.

I wouldn't have filmed The Color Purple if the book had been a big fat novel. The reason I read it is because it is thin.

The doctrine of original sin claims that all men sinned in Adam; but whether they did or whether it is merely a fact that all men sin does not basically affect the problem of suffering.