The person who is impatient with weakness will be ineffective in his leadership. The evidence of our strength lies not in the distance that separates us from other runners but in our closure with them, our slower pace for their sakes, our helping them pick it up and cross the line.

There are people who have the capacity to imagine themselves as someone else, there are people who have no such capacity (when the lack is extreme, we call them psychopaths), and there are people who have the capacity but choose not to exercise it.

We can only know and understand ourselves fully through others — through the way we experience others and ourselves in relation to others, and the way others experience us.

Nevertheless we understood each other on all levels of madness...

New York gets god awful cold in the winter but there's a feeling of wacky comradeship somewhere in the streets.

When I got better I realized what a rat he was, but then I had to understand the impossible complexity of his life, how he had to leave me there, sick, to get on with his wives and woes.

As we rode in the bus in the weird phosphorescent void of the Lincoln Tunnel we leaned on each other with fingers waving and yelled and talked excitedly, and I was beginning to get the bug like Dean.

Nonetheless we understood each other on other levels of madness...

Mamata Banerjee and Narendra Modi, the ultimate didi and dada of Indian politics, should really commiserate.

We live in a culture that relishes tearing others down. It's ultimately more fulfilling, though, to help people reach their goals. Instead of feeling jealous, remember: If God did it for them, He can do it for you.

Everybody has losses - it's unavoidable in life. Sharing our pain is very healing.

If the dream of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is to live, our babies must live. Our mothers must choose life. If we refuse to answer the cry of mercy from the unborn, and ignore the suffering of the mothers, then we are signing our own death warrants.