There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.

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A friend gathers all the pieces and gives them back in the right order.

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Laughter is more serious than tears.

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All important things are hard.

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The peace I am thinking of is the dance of an open mind when it engages another equally open one.

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Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it, summon it, from even the most tragic of circumstances.

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From my point of view, your life is already a miracle of chance waiting for you to shape its destiny.

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I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge - even wisdom. Like art.

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I am a writer and my faith in the world of art is intense, but not irrational, nor naïve - because art takes us and makes us take a journey beyond price, beyond cost, into bearing witness to the world as it is and as it should be. Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it, summon it, from even the most tragic of circumstances.

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I tell my students, 'When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.

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