“We live our lives, made up of a great quantity of / isolated instants / So as to be lost at the heart of a multitude of things.”

“Our culture made a virtue of living only as extroverts. We discouraged the inner journey, the quest for a center. So we lost our center and have to find it again.”

“What we perceive about ourselves is greatly a reflection of how we will end up living our lives.”

“We live but a short time, at the longest. How do we make our lives mean something? If we die in glory, with our minds and our hearts fixed on achieving a great goal, we have lived a life that mattered.”

“We were afraid of so many things: Of our children, who lived in their own world of casually lurid pleasures, zombies and cartoon killers and thuggish music. Of our neighbors, who were buying gold and ammunition and great quantities of freeze-dried food, and who were organizing themselves into angry tribes recognizable to one another by bumper stickers.”

“We are born to love as we are born to die, and between the heartbeats of those two great mysteries lies all the tangled undergrowth of our tiny lives. There is nowhere to go but through. And so we walk on, lost, and lost again, in the mapless wilderness of love.”