“No one knows the nature of God, or even if God exists. In a sense, all of our religions are literary works of the imagination.”

One cannot walk down an avenue, converse with a friend, enter a building, browse beneath the sandstone arches of an old arcade without meeting an instrument of time.

I think e-mail is representative of our fast food mentality in the United States, where everything has gotten faster and faster, and we’re required to respond to inputs more quickly with less time for thought and reflection.

The relationship between science and the humanities is two-way. Science changes our view of the world and our place in it. In the other direction, the humanities provide the store of ideas and images and language available to us in understanding the world.

Time is a rigid, bonelike structure, extending infinitely ahead and behind, fossilizing the future as well as the past.

Others hold that each decision must be considered and committed to, that without commitment there is chaos. Such people are content to live in contradictory worlds, so long as they know the reason for each.

Originality is also very important to a writer. And all of the writers I’ve mentioned, of course, are original, but it’s important to me that every book that I do be really a completely fresh and new look at the world.

The tragedy of this world is that everyone is alone. For a life in the past cannot be shared with the present. Each person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone.

As a scientist, I don’t believe science will ever discover whether God exists. Nor do I believe religion will ever prove it.

Not only will two different readers get something different but so will a single reader at different points in his life.

If you told a story that was all darkness, it wouldn’t be real.

And if we can’t unplug from that machine, eventually we’re going to become mindless.

The tragedy of this world is that no one is happy, whether stuck in a time of pain or joy.

Illuminated by only the most feeble red light, for light is diminished to almost nothing at the center of time, its vibrations slowed to echoes in vast canyons, its intensity reduced to the faint glow of fireflies.

Is it possible for a person to love without wanting love back? Is anything so pure? Or is love, by its nature, a reciprocity, like oceans and clouds, an evaporating of seawater and a replenishing by rain?

We’ve lost our way, we have lost our centeredness.

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

Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don’t know because we don’t want to know.

Governance can dig itself into a huge hole and not even know it’s in there.

Doctor, you don’t know what it is to doubt everything, even yourself. No, you don’t; you couldn’t with eyebrows like yours.

It is dangerous to know, but it is more dangerous not to know.

You know, our sense of individuality is just the number one target of civilization.

You know, I don’t want to stand out too much.

I don’t know who made it, all I know is it was put in my head that two plus two is four. So certain things happen. Why does it rain? Why am I so sexy? I don’t know.

I wanted to become the seeker, the aroused and passionate explorer, and it was better to go at it knowing nothing at all, always choosing the unmarked bottle, always choosing your own unproven method, armed with nothing but faith and a belief in astonishment.