“He is life's liberating force.He is release of limbs and communion through dance.He is laughter, and music in flutes. He is repose from all cares -- he is sleep!When his blood bursts from the grapeand flows across tables laid in his honorto fuse with our blood,he gently, gradually, wraps us in shadowsof ivy-cool sleep.”

“Young man, two are the forces most precious to mankind.The first is Demeter, the Goddess.She is the Earth -- or any name you wish to call her -- and she sustains humanity with solid food.Next came Dionysus, the son of the virgin, bringing the counterpart to bread: wineand the blessings of life's flowing juices.His blood, the blood of the grape,lightens the burden of our mortal misery.Though himself a God, it is his blood we pour outto offer thanks to the Gods. And through him, we are blessed.”

“Knowledge is not wisdom: cleverness is not, not without awareness of our death, not without recalling just how brief our flare is. He who overreaches will, in his overreaching, lose what he possesses, betray what he has now. That which is beyond us, which is greater than the human, the unattainably great, is for the mad, or for those who listen to the mad, and then believe them.”

“Oh, say, how call ye this,To face, and smile, the comrade whom his kissBetrayed? Scorn? Insult? Courage? None of these:'Tis but of all man's inward sicknessesThe vilest, that he knoweth not of shameNor pity! Yet I praise him that he came . . .To me it shall bring comfort, once to clearMy heart on thee, and thou shalt wince to hear.”

“In His wisdom, our God formed us out of the dirt. In His empathy, He spent a life walking through our dirt. In His grace, He let His sacrificial blood fall to the dirt. Then in His love, he picks us up from that dirt.”

“He still had the power to stagger her at timessimply the fact that he was breathing that all his organs were in their proper places that blood flowed quietly and effectively through his small sturdy limbs. He was her flesh and blood her mother had told her in the hospital the day Akash was born.”

“What mortal claims, by searching to the utmost limit, to have found out the nature of God, or of his opposite, or of that which comes between, seeing as he doth this world of man tossed to and fro by waves of contradiction and strange vicissitudes?”