"My students are like sponges, I swear to god.  ....  Mostly, the women want to write about themselves, and it helps them, you know?  Gives them wings, so that they can rise above the confounding maze of their lives and, from that perspective, begin to see the patterns and the dead ends of their pasts, and a way out.  That's the funny thing about mazes: what's baffling on the ground begins to make sense when you can begin to rise above it, the better to understand your history and fix yourself".  

... "Still, I hope the book advances the notion that power must be used responsibly and mercifully, and that we are all responsible for one another.  These things I believe: 
~ That, as James Baldwin once put it, 'People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes back to them, poisoned.'
~ That wars, because of the terrible cost they exact, are never won.
~ That love is stronger than hatred."

from Wally Lamb's The Hour I First Believed