“Perhaps when we die our names are takenfrom us by a divine magnet and are freeto flutter here and there within the bodies of birds.I'll be a simple crowwho can reach the top of Antelope Butte.(From: Hard Times)”

“There are times when personal experience keeps us from reaching the mountain top and so we let it go because the weight of it is too heavy. And sometimes the mountain top is difficult to reach with all our resources, factual and confessional, so we are just there, collectively grasping, feeling the limitations of knowledge, longing together, yearning for a way to reach that highest point. Even this yearning is a way to know.”

“We take spiritual initiation when we become conscious of the Divine within us, and thereby contact the Divine without us.”

“To love! To surrender absolutely, to prostrate oneself before the divine image, to die a thousand imaginary deaths, to annihilate every trace of self, to find the whole universe embodied and enshrined in the living image of another! Adolescent, we say. Rot! This is the germ of the future life, the seed which we hide away, which we bury deep within us, which we smother and stifle and do our utmost to destroy as we advance from one experience to another and flutter and flounder and lose our way.”

“If we are constantly aware of the seeds of divinity in us, it willhelp us rise above earthly challenges and difficulties. Brigham Young said:'When I look upon the faces of intelligent beings I look upon the imageof the God I serve. There are none but what have a certain portion ofdivinity within them; and though we are clothed with bodies which are inthe image of our God, yet this mortality shrinks before that portion ofdivinity which we inherit from our Father' (Discourses of BrighamYoung, sel. John A. Widtsoe [1941], 168). Being aware of our divineheritage will help men young and old to grow and magnify the divinity whichis within them and within all of us.”

“Until that time, I had understood death as something entirely separate from and independent of life. The hand of death is about to take us, I had felt, but until the day it reaches out for us, it leaves us alone. This had seemed to me the simple, logical truth. Life is here, death is over there. I am here, not over there. That night Kizuki died, however, I lost the ability to see death (and life) in such simple terms. Death was not the opposite of life. It was already here, within my being, it had always been here, and no struggle would permit me to forget that. When it took the 17-year-old Kizuki that night in May, death took me as well.”