“...no one who has ever lived through the unmasking of one ideology, taken uncritically as the truth about human life, will be quite as vulnerable to the absolutizing of another.-Sexuality and Spiritual Growth”

“My humanity includes not just what I am at the present moment, but what I can be. I am also my future, To exclude the potential from the real, and identify the real only with what is already actualized is another form of reductionism.-Sexuality and Spiritual Growth”

“The sense of adventure and curiosity to see what the future holds is the other side of serenity. It, too, is a spiritual state most attractive in people in transition, whether entering adulthood or preparing for death.-Sexuality and Spiritual Growth”

“Spirituality without a prayer life is no spirituality at all, and it will not last beyond the first defeats. Prayer is an opening of the self so that the Word of God can break in and make us new. Prayer unmasks. Prayer converts. Prayer impels. Prayer sustains us on the way. Pray for the grace it will take to continue what you would like to quit.”

“Not much about California, on its own preferred terms, has encouraged its children to see themselves as connected to one another.”

“Above all, she is the girl who 'feels' things, who has hung on to the freshness and pain of adolescence, the girl ever wounded, ever young. Now, at an age when the wounds begin to heal whether one wants them to or not, Joan Baez rarely leaves the Carmel Valley.”

“I have become my own version of an optimist. If I can't makeit through one door, I'll go through another door -- or I'llmake a door. Something terrific will come no matter how darkthe present.”