“I needed something--the distraction of another life--to alleviate fear.”

“When we sat down to eat I took inventory of the people in the room, and the remnants of my good mood evaporated when I realized how very little I had in common with them the career dads, the respo...”

“You learn to move on without the people you love.”

“I had dreamed of something so different from what reality was now offering up, but that dream had been a blind man's vision. That dream was a miracle. The morning was fading. And I remembered yet a...”

“The reassuring smile was now useless. I was plastic. Everything was veiled. Objectivity, facts, hard information--these were things only in the outline stage. There was nothing tying anything toget...”

“I kept staring into the blackness of the woods, drawn into the darkness as I always had been. I suddenly realized how alone I was. (But this is how you travel, the wind whispered back, this is how ...”

“As spiritual searchers we need to become freer and freer of the attachment to our own smallness in which we get occupied with me-me-me. Pondering on large ideas or standing in front of things which...”

“Clinging to our ideas of perfection isolates us from life and is a barrier.”

“Teaching English is (as professorial jobs go) unusually labor-intensive and draining. To do it well, you have to spend a lot of time coaching students individually on their writing and thinking. St...”

“I hold you in the safest place I keep. Somewhere between memories and scars.”

“Life is just a slide. Back and forth between loving and leaving, remembering and forgetting, holding on and letting go.”

“The old adage that people only want what they cant have or what they cant tame is totally primitive. A being of higher origins will know instinctively that life on earth is a series of chances, mom...”

“A human being in this aged nation of ours is a very wonderful whole, the slow creation of long interchanging influences; and charm is a result of two such wholes, the one loving and the one loved.”

“The more one judges, the less one loves.”

“[N]one of us drinks the chalice of our existence to the last drop. None of us is fully obedient. Each of us falls short of the human nature entrusted to us.”