Kindness with no spine behind it is only an invitation.

But kindness armed with the truth, and backed by the patient machinery of the law, is the strongest thing I have ever seen — strong enough to take back everything, strong enough to build all of this out of the wreckage.

I think about that distinction a great deal, because I meet, every week, people who have learned it the hard way, in the very worst place to learn it.

They come into this building ashamed.

That is the thing that surprised me most when I started this work — not the anger, the shame.

The old man whose son emptied his retirement account is not, first, furious; he is mortified, convinced the theft is somehow a verdict on him, on his softness, on his failure to be hard enough with the people he loved.