“I take the position that true faith is not a supersessional knowledge. It cannot discard the intellect.”

“Orthodox devotions that do not let in the light of modern knowledge are no more than a form of ancestor worship.”

“...if justice cannot be made to operate under the worst possible conditions of social hysteria, what does it matter how it operates at other times?”

“I knew he was unreliable, but he was fun to be with. He was a child’s ideal companion, full of surprises and happy animal energy. He enjoyed food and drink. He liked to try new things. He brought home coconuts, papayas, mangoes, and urged them on our reluctant conservative selves. On Sundays he liked to discover new places, take us on endless bus or trolley rides to some new park or beach he knew about. He always counseled daring, in whatever situation, the courage to test the unknown, an instruction that was thematically in opposition to my mother’s.”

“I try to avoid experience if I can. Most experience is bad.”

“So what I realized when I was a child was that if I were traveling as fast as light while holding a mirror before me, I would not see my image in the mirror, because as fast as the image of my face in light moved toward the mirror, why, just as fast would the mirror be moving away... It is a rather frightening idea, in fact, that if I moved at the speed of light, I could get no confirmation of my existence from an objective source of reflected light such as a mirror. I would be like a ghost in the universe, materially unverifiable in the stream of time.”

“I am telling you what I know—words have music and if you are a musician you will write to hear them.”