To give ourselves over to introspection is to build our own private cocoon.

I often think of life as a great darkened room with a mammoth-sized tapestry fastened to a stone wall. I believe true peace can be achieved not in viewing the whole tapestry, but in accepting without bitterness those portions we have been afforded the luxury to see.

It's all about overcoming adversity. It's about being down and coming back.

It was not the privileged and the fortunate who took in the Jews in France. It was the marginal and damaged, which should remind us that there are real limits to what evil and misfortune can accomplish. If you take away the gift of reading, you create the gift of listening. If you bomb a city, you leave behind death and destruction. But you create a community of remote misses. If you take away a mother or a father, you cause suffering and despair. But one time in ten, out of that despair rises as indomitable force. You see the giant and the shepherd in the Valley of Elah and your eye is drawn to the man with sword and shield and the glittering armor. But so much of what is beautiful and valuable in the world comes from the shepherd, who has more strength and purpose than we ever imagine.

Strength doesn't come from what you can do. It comes from overcoming the things you once thought you couldn't.

I heard someone say once that many of us only seem able to find heaven by backing away from hell. And while the place that I've arrived at in my life may not precisely be everyone's idea of heavenly, I could swear sometimes -- I hear angels sing.