On Being with Krista Tippett

How can black people write about flowers at a time like this? Forgive me for I've been nurturing my well-worn grudges against beauty.

How can black people write about flowers at a time like this? Dear reader, with our heels digging into the good mud at a swamp's edge you might tell me something about the dandelion head and how it is not a flower itself but a plant made up of many small flowers at its crown and lord knows I have been called by what I look like more than I have been called by what I actually am and I wish to return the favor for the purpose of this exercise which, too, is an attempt at fashioning something pretty out of seeds refusing to make anything worthwhile of their burial.

I saved men from total annihilation, from almost certain death, and now I am to endure these terrible tortures, painful to feel, almost worse to observe. I treated men with compassion but was not thought worthy enough to receive it in return. Instead, I will be displayed for all to see, so ruthlessly abused that even Zeus averts his eyes.

one of the things that I learned from life but it came to the fore in writing the book on trauma is that not just individuals but whole communities undergo trauma.

I once was a happy but confused Christian child and now I am a wiser, still fundamentally happy yet humbled Christian leader. Humbled by life and by my own understanding of the complexities, horrors, and gifts of the Christian faith.

Theology is a place and a story. Theology is the place and the story you think of when you ask yourself about the meaning of your life, of the world, of the possibility of God.

This land is your land, this land is my land from California to the New York Island. I've never sung in public before. This land is made for you and me.

As I went walking, I saw a sign there and on the sign it said, no trespassing. But on the other side, it didn't say nothing. That side was made for you and me. And then he sings, and in the shadow of the steeple, I saw my people. By the relief office, I seen my people. And they stood there hungry and I stood there asking, is this land made for you and me?

Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. And then James Baldwin says, I use the word love here, not merely in the personal sense, but as a state of being or a state of grace. Not in the infantile American sense of being made happy, but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.

I sat out, I started to write a book that was explaining theology to people who didn't have theology backgrounds, and I discovered that I couldn't talk about theologians without telling the story of my childhood.

My daughter bought your book, Course Fires, for me after hearing you on the radio.

My daughter bought your book, Course Fires, for me after hearing you on the radio.

I call my father we talk around the news it is too much for him neither of his two languages can reach it. I drive into the country to find sheep, cows, to plead with the air. Who calls anyone civilized? Where can the crying heart graze? What does a true Arab do now?

I call my father, we talk around the news, it is too much for him. Neither of his two languages can reach it. I drive into the country to find sheep, cows to plead with the air. Who calls anyone civilized? Where can the crying heart graze? What does a true Arab do now?

I love this description he gives of Wiesel's face. It looks like a map of the world if the world had been wounded but still managed to laugh.

when I pick up your book now, Witness, which is lessons from Elie Wiesel's classroom, which you wrote from it sounds like countless notebooks that you took of your time as his student and teaching alongside him to some extent.

The discussions that you describe in that classroom about good and evil and how to be moral and how to engage difference and how to engage serious, complex questions and disagreement where good and evil are not at all clear or what to do with that.

How can you sing? How can you not?

the Holocaust was not his subject, but it was the lens of experience through which he approached all other subjects

the power of memory was the most important ingredient in an educational approach that could lead to a more moral, a more human world

when you encounter stories and really allow them to change you, to change your mind and your heart and your nervous system, your behavior changes

to disagree, to engage with controversy does not mean to refuse to listen

never allow anyone to be humiliated in your presence

Alain de Botton's essay, Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person, is one of the most read articles in the New York Times of recent years, and this is one of the most popular episodes we've ever created.

I happened to see your tweet at the end of 2016 when the New York Times released its most read articles of the year and your Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person was number one, which is really extraordinary.

Every fall into love involves the triumph of hope over knowledge.

a wiser culture than ours would recognize that the start of a relationship is not the high point that romantic art assumes. It is merely the first step of a far longer, more ambivalent and yet quietly audacious journey on which we should direct our intelligence and scrutiny.

Marriage ends up as a hopeful, generous, infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don't know yet who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of and have carefully avoided investigating.

the person you'll marry will not be Mr. or Mrs. Right, as defined by romantic culture. And that the idea of rightness is in fact the error.

the wrong person is okay. And in fact, it's the right person who's the trouble one, the vision of the right person is the one that gives us so much grief and sets us off on all sorts of, you know, chimerical journeys that lead nowhere.

I mean, there's...I think this is the first line, every fall into love involves the triumph of hope over knowledge.

In a scene in On Love is you start to be enamored in details of this new person and find things in common. Like I don't know, both of us had two large freckles on the toe of the left foot.

Every fall into love involves the triumph of hope over knowledge.

I think what I found really refreshing about your book and something that I don't think is out there enough is, you know, what depression really is and what it really is not. It's not sadness, really.

And it teaches you how big emotion is. The profundity of the inner self, I suppose, would be the best way of putting it.

If humanity is of nature, then so are our inventions. Yes, exactly. And it ends that passage with the line, that art itself is nature.

I think the idea that there is a real self and that changing it in any way with medication is artificial is like the idea that you really have teeth that fall out when you're 30 and that you're artificially changing them by using modern dental care.

depression is the flaw in love

I hated being depressed, but it was also in depression that I learned my own acreage, the full extent of my soul.

If humanity is of nature, then so are our inventions.

we try a new drug, a new combination of drugs and suddenly I fall into my life again.

depression is the flaw in love