“Before familiarity can turn into awareness the familiar must be stripped of its inconspicuousness; we must give up assuming that the object in question needs no explanation. However frequently recurrent, modest, vulgar it may be it will now be be labeled as something unusual.”

“But when fundamentals are doubted, as at present, we must try to recoverthe candour and wonder of the child; the unspoilt realism and objectivity of innocence. Or if we cannot do that, wemust try at least to shake off the cloud of mere custom and see the thing as new, if only by seeing it as unnatural.Things that may well be familiar so long as familiarity breeds affection had much better become unfamiliar when familiarity breeds contempt. For in connection with things so great as are here considered, whatever our view of them,contempt must be a mistake. Indeed contempt must be an illusion. We must invoke the most wild and soaring sort ofimagination; the imagination that can see what is there.”

“...We leave our homeland, our property and our friends. We give up the familiar ground that supports our ego, admit the helplessness of ego to control its world and secure itself. We give up our clingings to superiority and self-preservation...It means giving up searching for a home, becoming a refugee, a lonely person who must depend on himself...Fundamentally, no one can help us. If we seek to relieve our loneliness, we will be distracted from the path. Instead, we must make a relationship with loneliness until it becomes aloneness.”

“We must pose the familiar question about how far our civil liberties have been eroded by the national security state… Somehow it is always a choice between habeas corpus and hundreds of corpses.”

“Following Christ isn't something that can be done halfheartedly or on the side. It is not a label we can display when it is useful. It must be central to everything we do and are.”

“Now I must give one smirk and then we may be rational again”