And I’m not confused about the lack of, or the need for, imagination in low or high places. We could do better we must do better. There are far worse things to drop on people than crayolas.

I get tired of hearing it's a crummy world and that people are no damned good. What kind of talk is that? I know a place in Payette, Idaho, where a cook and a waitress and a manager put everything they've got into laying a chicken-fried steak on you.

All of these are names given me by other people, but not names I would have given myself. My name is not mine, it's theirs. It's a series of costumes put on my life by other people.

All I ever needed to know I learned in kindergarten. Share everything ... Don't hit people ... Clean up your own mess ...

Maybe we should develop a Crayola bomb as our next secret weapon. A happiness weapon. A Beauty Bomb. And every time a crisis developed, we would launch one... And people would smile and get a little funny look on their faces and cover the world with imagination.

Every person passing through this life will unknowingly leave something and take something away. Most of this “something” cannot be seen or heard or numbered or scientifically detected or counted. It’s what we leave in the minds of other people and what they leave in ours. Memory. The census doesn’t count it. Nothing counts without it.

Is it always to be a winners-losers world, or can we keep everyone in the game? Do we still have what it takes to find a better way?

And it is still true, no matter how old you are, when you go out into the world it is best to hold hands and stick together.

The world does not need tourists who ride by in a bus clucking their tongues. The world as it is needs those who will love it enough to change it, with what they have, where they are.

I wanted to be a citizen of the world but not in a superficial way.

I'd like to speak a foreign language well enough to get the jokes. I'd like to talk with Socrates, and watch Michelangelo sculpt David. I'd like to see the world as it was a million years ago and a million years hence.

It wasn’t in books. It wasn’t in a church. What I needed to know was out there in the world.