“We are among the first peoples in human history who do not broadly inherit religious identity as a given, a matter of kin and tribe, like hair color and hometown. But the very fluidity of thisthe p...”

“John Lewis said, "You have to be taught the way of peace, the way of love, the way of nonviolence. In the religious sense, in the moral sense, you can say that in the bosom of every human being, th...”

“..moments of transport, and of comfort, and of a bracing vastness of possibility. That was all there for me sometimes when I plunged my mind into the Bibles puzzles; and it was always there in the ...”

“Weve made it private, contained it in family, when its audacity is in its potential to cross tribal lines. Weve fetishized it as romance, when its true measure is a quality of sustained, practical ...”

“Im helped by a gentle notion from Buddhist psychology, that there are near enemies to every great virtuereactions that come from a place of care in us, and which feel right and good, but which subt...”

“You can disagree with another person's opinions. You can disagree with their doctrines. You can't disagree with their experience.”

“Blood memory is described as our ancestral (genetic) connection to our language, songs, spirituality, and teachings. It is the good feeling that we experience when we are near these things.”

“The more serious about gardening I became, the more dubious lawns seemed. The problem for me was not, as it was for my father, the relation to my neighbors that a lawn implied; it was the lawns rel...”

“We having so much fun together!! 'through nature..through people..through religion...through culture..through friendship...we manage to learn something that lead to a better relationship among huma...”

“There are many different stories to tell. It's never the same. Every day weather blows in and out, alters the surface. Sometimes it is stripped down to a single essential truth, the thing that is a...”

“I'm skimming across the surface of my own history, moving fast, riding the melt beneath the blades, doing loops and spins, and when I take a high leap into the dark and come down thirty years later...”

“All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel.All of them?Sure, he says. Think about it. There's escaping from the wolves, fighting the wolves, cap...”

“All words are pegs to hang ideas on.”

“A word is not the same with one writer as it is with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.”

“No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake....”