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Sometimes it takes a natural disaster to reveal a social disaster.

Disaster, to me, means in some big or small way, things going wrong. And that's obviously a matter of perception, right? Let's say your puppy chewed up all the shoes in your house. She probably had a fine time doing that. In her mind, a red letter day, the highlight of her puppy life.

Crises are part of life. Everybody has to face them, and it doesn't make any difference what the crisis is.

Alas, I emerge from one disaster to fall into a worse.

When you love someone, you care about them. If they have a disaster, you don't abandon them.

In all natural disasters through time, man needs to attach meaning to tragedy, no matter how random and inexplicable the event is.

I feel often that we don't have the right language to talk about emotions in disasters. Everyone is on edge, of course, but it also pulls people away from a lot of trivial anxieties and past and future concerns and gratuitous preoccupations that we have, and refocuses us in a very intense way.

If you ever face a significant disaster, do your best to keep up the spirits of those around you, act flexibly and creatively to help, try to sort rumors from truth, and remember that the decisions you make will have repercussions after the disaster has passed.