We think we should have to work in order to feel. We want to have our cake resist us; and then we want to eat it, too.

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.

Never join a conspiracy that you could possibly betray, because if you could, someone else will.

I'll be home for Christmas. You can count on me.

The art of giving is perfected through anonymity.

The period of youth is the glory of nature, and the healthful development of all the resources of strength deposited in our nature is the glory of youth.

I think you've all heard my story about my daughter and how we felt Children's Hospital saved her life when she was less than a year old. I won't go through all of the details of that.

We are opening up an enormous new era in archaeology. Time capsules in the deep oceans.

I try to go through it [emotional pain]; understanding is going to take me to a better place. And I do hot yoga.

The consciousness of one's physical self had to be repressed because, socially, the female body was so visible, an ongoing provocation and incitement of specular curiosity and fascination.

Either we're aware and present, or we're not. There is no half way.