“Like the air we breathe or like the passage of time, is central to our existence as intelligent beings.”

The second squirms and wriggles like a bluefish in a bay. The first is unyielding, predetermined. The second makes up its mind as it goes along.

In this world, artists are joyous. Unpredictability is the life of their paintings, their music, their novels. They delight in events not forecasted, happenings without explanation, retrospective.

In this world, there are two times. There is mechanical time and there is body time.” “They do not keep clocks in their houses. Instead, they listen to their heartbeats. They feel the rhythms of their moods and desires.”

So it’s really about two and a half months that I’ll feel like I can recover some silence in my life…which is so hard to find.

There is a cultural diversity that’s very valuable, and it’s valuable to have different ways of looking at the world.

To that end, I believe that we should make room for both spiritual atheists and thinking believers.

And if the present has little effect on the future, present actions need not be weighed for their consequence.

As I understand it, a universe is a … well, a totality. A universe is everything that is, as far as the inside of the thing.

Each time is true, but the truths are not the same.

For my students who are trying to learn the craft of writing in a writing class – contemporary literature is what’s most useful.

If a person holds no ambitions in this world, he suffers unknowingly.

I have no opposition at all to technology. I think technology is a wonderful thing that has to be used thoughtfully, and we can’t just assume that every bit of new technology improvesthe quality of life; it’s really in how the technology is used.

The belief or disbelief in such a Being is therefore a matter of faith.

It’s exciting having a student who is not used to expressing their emotional side and bringing that out in them and see that developing and helping to nurture that.

I should have written books instead of reading them.

Continents of memory had been lost.

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter had such an illumination, beginning my long search for the truth of the story and flashing light into the long two years ahead.

Science begets knowledge; opinion, ignorance.

We lose the magic whenever we stop telling our story and begin to wonder how we’re doing, if we’re selling it, if the listener likes us.

Our old history ends with the Cross; our new history begins with the resurrection.

Civilization begins with distillation

a little sounder for those who come after. Nobody begins or ends anything. Each person is a link, weak or strong, in an endless chain.

All diseases begin in the gut.

Truth always originates in a minority of one, and every custom begins as a broken precedent.