“We have to live within the framework of our limitations and the mistakes we make. Argue with Destiny, but never try to wrestle it into submission. If you do, youll end up losing.”

“I dont enjoy surprises that compel me to renegotiate my relationship with the past.”

“Stop trying to be a magician. The past wont come back. It likes its safety in memory.”

“I suspect each of us uses the past to prop up the bruised present. Its a clumsy try for the comfort of normality.”

“If manifestations of her love are overwhelming and sometimes seem imprudent, its because the intensity of such caring doesnt exist in other areas of life. Ma does not love from behind a protective ...”

“I don’t enjoy surprises that compel me to renegotiate my relationship with the past.”

“I would not say I was a nonbeliever; rather, that I gave little if any thought to celestial concerns. It did not seem to me that God, whoever he was, would be the sort of god to take an interest in...”

“In my experiences, the common critic of Christianity, when he thinks of Christianity, imagines a sort of elementary, Sunday School blunder of elements: fiery Hell, an angry God, 'try not to sin', '...”

“Mario, what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic and a dyslexic?""I give.""You get someone who stays up all night torturing himself mentally over the question of whether or...”

“The sight of a worm excites my reverence more than all the gods men have invented.”

“For the natural polytheist, whose gods arise in and from the natural material world ... Our gods not only have transcendent eyes and metaphysical hands. They have antlers and feathers, hooves and s...”

“I sing to you of many more gods, gods of wind and water, gods of each mineral and the events that created them. I sing to you of the gods of protons, of quarks, of atomic forces binding and holding...”

“Men are not gentle and graceful beings solely oriented towards good. They are physical, coarse, contradictory, stretched between desires and temptations. In an unnatural wish to make them sinless a...”

“Lie down beside these watersThat bubble from the spring;Hear in the desert silenceThe desert sparrow sing;Draw from the shapeless momentSuch pattern as you can;And cleave henceforth to Beauty;Expec...”

“The motives of mankind are plainer than the motions they produce.”