On Being with Krista Tippett

Maria Shriver is a special anchor for NBC News. She's also the former First Lady of California and the author of several books including Just Who Will You Be? and most recently I've Been Thinking Reflections, Prayers, and Meditations for a Meaningful Life.

It's so important that you name the problems and then you talk about how fascinating this is, right?

It's not a page turner.

And I would have written a book about men and their natural talents and how they're changing the world, but they've already done that. And we already know a lot of men's talents. And I don't I think women have been the mysterious sex.

I just recently learned this because I read this beautiful biography of Alexander von Humboldt which I know you read as well. What's the name? Andrea Wolfe. Something in Nature. Yeah Andrea Wolfe. The Invention of Nature.

It was published after September 11th but some of the poems in it preceded September 11th but the poems that related to the Middle East had been sort of scattered throughout my works.

I call my father, we talk around the news, it is too much for him. Neither of his two languages can reach it.

refugee, not always. Yes. Refugee, not always. Once a confident schoolboy strolling Jerusalem streets.

What do we say in the wake of one who was always homesick? Are you home now? Is Palestine peaceful in some dimension we can't see?

We were born to wander to grieve lost lineage what we did to one another on a planet so wide open for doing.

Buddhism without beliefs questions that probe ever deeper into what is still unknown

After Buddhism, we may need to unlearn Buddhist dogma to discover the dharma...to discover the dharma afresh but we may also need to unlearn the stories that Buddhism has constructed about its own past if we are to gain a three-dimensional and nuanced account of its history.

The way of the Buddha is a living response to a living question, yet whenever it has become institutionalized, its vital response has become a well-formulated answer. The seemingly important task of preserving a particular set of answers often causes the very questions which gave rise to the answers to be forgotten.

We didn't know when Rachel Carson wrote The Sea Around Us, published in 1951, 10 years before her silent world, the existence of those great mountain chains, hydrothermal vents, the existence of life in the deepest sea, seven miles down. Nobody had been there.

Goodnight dear void

I just wanted to write this down so goodnight dear void, you know, even if it's just going to the void.

I think the thing that it really taught me was that the person that we think we want to fall in love with is often the very opposite of the person who we should really fall in love with, right?

the love that builds inside both of these characters is one of longing and a really projection onto the unknown of what might be.

Three little words. I've got mail from you, right? Like she feels it in anticipation. Yeah, before she's really able to explain it.

I suppose it's no good telling you again that we're innocent. No good. It's not for myself, I'm asking. Other men with families who had to die for this sort of thing, it's too bad, but it's justice.

Justice? What do you care about justice? You don't even care whether you've got the right men or not. All you know is you've lost something and somebody's got to be punished.

I tell you there's nobody to look out for and they're in a strange place. Can't you understand that, you butcher?

This is a fine company for a man to die with.

Man just naturally can't take the law into his own hands and hang people without hurting everybody in the world. Because then he's just not breaking one law, but all laws.

Goodnight dear void

I just wanted to write this down so goodnight dear void, you know, even if it's just going to the void.