“Sometimes the essay is where we end up when everything that we know must change.”

“Maybe every essay automatically is in some way experimental — less an outline traveling toward a foregone conclusion than an unmapped quest that has sprung from the word 'question'.”

“What happens when an essayist starts imagining things, making things up, filling in blank spaces, or — worse yet — leaving the blanks blank?”

“Anyhow we never know where we must go, nor what guides we are to get---people,storms, guardian angels, or sheep....”

“This is why Paul upholds the teaching of the gospel in such a forceful way ... Seeing such an example and such a picture of man’s great weakness and fickleness, Paul states that the truth of the gospel must supersede anything that we may devise … he is showing us that we ought to know the substance of the doctrine which is brought to us in the name of God, so that our faith can be fully grounded upon it. Then we will not be tossed about with every wind, nor will we wander about aimlessly, changing our opinions a hundred times a day; we will persist in this doctrine until the end. This, in brief, is what we must remember.”

“Death in itself is nothing; but we fear.To be we know not what, we know not where.”

“Most of us plateau when we lose the tension between where we are and where we ought to be.”