Emilie Richards

“We all have the same God, we just serve him differently. Rivers, lakes, ponds, streams, oceans all have different names, but they all contain water. So do religions have different names, and they all contain truth, expressed in different ways forms and times. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a Muslim, a Christian, or a Jew.…

“Our human compassion binds us the one to the other, not in pity or patronizingly, but as human beings who have learned how to turn our common suffering into hope for the future.” ~Nelson Mandela

“It matters not who you love, where you love, when you love, or how you love. It matters only that you love.” ~John Lennon We had the delightful experience of seeing a Beatles tribute band Rain, this past week in the Chautauqua Institution amphitheater. I was reminded, revisiting the wonderful songs of a band I’ve…

“The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.” ― Elizabeth Hardwick

  I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain. -James Baldwin

“It’s like the great stories, Mr. Frodo, the ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were, and sometimes you didn’t want to know the end because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad has happened? But in the…

“Forgiveness is simply about understanding that every one of us is both inherently good and inherently flawed. Within every hopeless situation and every seemingly hopeless person lies the possibility of transformation.” ~Archbishop Desmond Tutu