What is it that makes a person insist passionately on the existence of metaphysical realities that can be neither demonstrated nor refuted? (176)

[Mindfulness] is not concerned with anything transcendent or divine. It serves as an antidote to theism, a cure for sentimental piety, a scalpel for excising the tumor of metaphysical belief. (130)

To embrace suffering culminates in greater empathy, the capacity to feel what it is like for the other to suffer, which is the ground for unsentimental compassion and love. (157)

The kind of love that offers its life so easily, so stupidly is always the love that is not returned.

Trust me, you see the dead walking around, you learn not to scream, laugh, or piss yourself pretty quickly.

To me, the Holocaust stands alone as the most horrible human event in modern civilization.

You don't want to cover a subject; you want to uncover it.

Strangely, Dante's Divine Comedy did not produce a prose of that creative height or it did so after centuries.

I have given a name to my pain, and it is Batman.

I talk a lot. I express a lot of my feelings verbally.

the task of each family is also the task of all humanity. This is to cherish the living, remember those who have gone before, and prepare for those who are not yet born.

The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas - uncertainty, progress, change - into crimes.

Don't be over complacent or too feverish, take a middle path.