“Good conversational debate is an end in itself, and talking for the love of conversation is what makes us human.”

“[I]t is things that make us happy when conversation begins to reveal itself as a paltry substitute.”

“I make conversation like I make love to myself—I let my hands do all the talking.”

“Reading is a conversation. All books talk. But a good book listens as well.”

“There was so little to learn from that conversation, and yet it struck me that the very existence of the conversation itself was the lesson; art has nothing to do with Life's fickle intentions: write what you want. Draw what you want. Perform what you can. In the end, the unexpected twists -- the mutated cells, the choked arteries, the swerving vans -- will always tell the ending.”

“Eden is a conversation. It is the conversation of the human with the Divine. And it is the reverberations of that conversation that create a sense of place. It is not a thing, Eden, but a pattern of relationships, made visible in conversation. To live in Eden is to live in the midst of good relations, of just relations scrupulously attended to, imaginatively maintained through time. Altogether we call this beauty.”