“I'm getting used to this planet and to this curious human culture which is as cheerfully enthusiastic as it is cheerfully crue”

“Why do we people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute?”

“I alternate between thinking of the planet as home - dear and familiar stone hearth and garden - and as a hard land of exile in which we are all sojourners.”

“We teach our children one thing only, as we were taught: to wake up. We teach our children to look alive there, to join by words and activities the life of human culture on this planet's crust. As adults we are almost all adept at waking up. We have so mastered the transition we make a hundred times a day, as, like so many will-less dolphins, we plunge and surface, lapse and emerge. We live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall. Useless, I say. Valueless, I might add — until someone hauls their wealth up to the surface and into the wide-awake city, in a form that people can use.”

“How loose he seemed to himself, under the stars! The spaces between the stars were pores, out of which human meaning evaporated.”

“Why, why in the blue-green world write this sort of thing? Funny written culture, I guess; we pass things on.”

“The interior life expands and fills; it approaches the edge of skin; it thickens with its own vivid story; it even begins to hear rumors, from beyond the horizon skin’s rim, of nations and wars. You wake one day and discover your grandmother; you wake another day and notice, like any curious naturalist, the boys.”