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“Everyone must come out of his Exile in his own way.”
― Martin Buber

“One afternoon I opened an email from her that included a passage from the work of Pema Chodron, a Buddhist teacher and writer whom I had long admired. "To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man's-land.”
― Dani Shapiro, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
― Theodore Roosevelt

“Donating sperm was not the same as, say, donating a kidney. Or a retina. It was the passing along of an essence that was inseparable from personhood itself.”
― Dani Shapiro, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love