“Ours is a culture that dances on the edge of ephemerality. If our servers slept for too long or if we left our iPads unplugged for too long, we'd wake up like Rip Van Winkle to find all of our book culture erased.”

“Empathy took the edge off, and the truth is, we need our edge. Our edge is trying to speak to us, and we are too, too good at shutting it up.”

“I've just been around too much death today not to wonder why we find it appropriate to organize our festivities in and around the tombs of all these ancient cultures.”

“All of us somehow felt that the next battleground was going to be culture. We all felt somehow that our culture had been stolen from us – by commercial forces, by advertising agencies, by TV broadcasters. It felt like we were no longer singing our songs and telling stories, and generating our culture from the bottom up, but now we were somehow being spoon-fed this commercial culture top down.”

“In this huge old occidental culture our teaching elders are books. Books are our grandparents!”

“American culture is torn between our long romance with violence and our terror of the devastation wrought by war and crime and environmental havoc. ”