The past empowers the present, and the sweeping footsteps leading to this present mark the pathways to the future.

We are not what we know but what we are willing to learn.

The human species thinks in metaphors and learns through stories.

What would it be like to have not only color vision but culture vision, the ability to see the multiple worlds of others.

There are few things as toxic as a bad metaphor. You can't think without metaphors.

As you get up in the morning, as you make decisions, as you spend money, make friends, make commitments, you are creating a piece of art called your life.

When parents die, all of the partings of the past are reevoked with the realization that this time they will not return.

The timing of death, like the ending of a story, gives a changed meaning to what preceded it.

Worlds can be found by a child and an adult bending down and looking together under the grass stems or at the skittering crabs in a tidal pool.

Every loss recapitulates earlier losses, but every affirmation of identity echoes earlier moments of clarity.

Goals too clearly defined can become blinkers.

Once we have seen Him in a stable, we can never be sure where He will appear or to what lengths he will go or to what ludicrous depths of self-humiliation He will descend in His wild pursuit of men.

«Couldn't never be nothin' but a nig*er, if I was ever so good, » said Topsy. «If I could be skinned, and come white, I'd try then.»

Oh, my, god, we are in a killing room. This is just like an episode of Dexter! They are going to murder us!” Mia exclaimed as she started to cry.

The air is Zeus, Zeus earth, and Zeus the heaven, Zeus all that is, and what transcends them all.

We have to become saints. We have to become like Christ. Anything less is simply not enough.

...perhaps there is some element of good even in the simple act of living, so long as the evils of existence do not preponderate too heavily.

Whether people grow fat by joking, or whether there is something in fat itself which predisposes to a joke, I have never been quite able to determine.

There is so much else in the world that is more interesting [ than monarchy].

I am in favor of stem-cell research. I am not in favor of creating new human embryos through cloning.

Our wills and fates do so contrary run.