When strangers meet, great allowances should be made for differences in custom and training.

He loved his family, his friends, his writing, his painting; he knew their flaws, but they neither surprised nor embittered him.

He showed me the lowest. I had to surmise the highest.

We need to forgive the adolescent versions of ourselves, if only because we need the practice to forgive those who are maturing awkwardly in our lives.

Looking back on his adolescence from the vantage point of his mid-eighties, George H.W. Bush candidly admitted, "I might have been obsessed with bodies – boobs they are now called. But what seventeen-year-old kid was not? Guilty am I.

He realized suddenly that it was one thing to see the past occupying the present, but the true test of prescience was to see the past in the future. Things persisted in not being what they seemed.