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"If we want to live in a world that truly does not experience war, we have to be a people who ask each other questions rather than filling in the blanks."

"We never made eye contact. I wondered what he would see if we did. What he saw when he looked in the mirror. What moments in time trapped his spirit so that everything after was like driving through a darkened city."

"At any given moment, we can look around and see chaos and impending doom. What we usually forget is that we can also see all of it as a part of the process of growth."

"If life is our ability to attain our unfoldment, as evidenced by the seed that sprouts into the tree and the increasingly rapid expansion of our universe, it follows then that forward motion must continue, or death and decay will set in."

"It was the Shah of ancient Persia who summoned a highly celebrated poet and asked him to create one verse––one sentence that would hold true under any circumstance––and could devotedly be applied to every emotion. The poet returned with these words, es el ge ansanee, and was banished from the palace. On his deathbed, the Shah asked the poet to grace the palace with his presence once again. This too shall pass."

"Trauma suspends language as the human psyche attempts to survive the experience; only through the creation of a new language can the trauma be understood and communicated. In his recent book, Vise and Shadow: Essays on the Lyric Imagination, Poetry, Art, and Culture, Balakian explores the ways in which traumatic experience is conveyed within poetry, nonfiction, art, film, and song through the works of Primo Levi, T.S. Eliot, Bob Dylan, Siamanto, Hart Crane, Joan Didion, Elia Kazan, and others."