“Happiness doesn't lie in conspicuous consumption and the relentless amassing of useless crap. Happiness lies in the person sitting beside you and your ability to talk to them. Happiness is clear-he...”

“And often the worst thing wasn't the victims--they were dead, after all, and beyond any more pain. The worst thing was those who loved them and survived them. Often the walking dead from now on, sh...”

“Sympathys easy. You have sympathy for starving children swatting at flies on the late-night commercials. Sympathy is easy because it comes from a position of power. Empathy is getting down on your ...”

“I believe in God. Maybe not the Catholic God or even the Christian one because I have a hard time seeing any God as elitist. I also have a hard time believing that anything that created rain forest...”

“Each day in this country, twenty-three hundred children are reported missing.”

“Some ghost of myself still lived back in the days when we'd shared a bed and talked of the future. But that love we'd had and those selves we'd been were gone, placed in a box like old photographs ...”

“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...”

“There are many things that make a man irritable when he arrives home from work in the evening and a sensible wife will usually notice the storm-signals and will leave him alone until he simmers down.”

“Oblivion, she thought. That was the world she lived in. It was what they should name some countries, towns, and places.”

“A lot of men wouldn't like being called a romantic. It's not macho enough.'Quite often men are fools.”