“Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain.”

“We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies—all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.”

“...the self can be as desperately stranded in the transcendence of theory as in the immanence of consumption.”

“I embrace Fate like a lover. All my life, Fate has wished to be my lover and tried to govern me. Now I turn to submit to his embraces.”

“To fare on - fusing the self that wakes and the self that dreams.”

“Classically, there are three ways in which humans try to find transcendence--religious meaning--apart from God as revealed through the cross of Jesus: through the ecstasy of alcohol and drugs, through the ecstasy of recreational sex, through the ecstasy of crowds. Church leaders frequently warn against the drugs and the sex, but at least, in America, almost never against the crowds.”