“The universe is a unity. Every material thing is in all things.All things come from all, and all is in all things.”

“It’s all right,” I said, spying what was inside his bag. “Went grocery shopping?”“I picked up a few things,” he said amicably, but then a silence stretched out between us. I got my key out, wanting to say so much more but not knowing where to start. “I see you did too.”Oh my God. I covered up the side of my bag, even though I knew he’d already seen the big yellow rooster with Cocks-A-Lot emblazoned on the side. I really had to have a word with Terry about his packaging.”

“The problem with aging is not that it's one damn thing after another—it's every damn thing, all at once, all the time.”

“My nipples tightened as I breathed in his musky scent mixed with cologne. I didn’t recognize the brand, but it spoke to something inside me. It whispered come closer, and my heart pounded harder.”

“Suffering is universal. it’s the one thing Buddhists, Christians, and Muslims are all worried about.”

“They say all things end. But I say all things begin.”

“[...] it is a strange thing that most of the feeling we call religious, most of the mystical outcrying which is one of the most prized and used and desired reactions of our species, is really the understanding and the attempt to say that man is related to the whole thing, related inextricably to all reality, known and unknowable. This is a simple thing to say, but the profound feeling of it made a Jesus, a St. Augustine, a St. Francis, a Roger Bacon, a Charles Darwin, and an Einstein. Each of them in his own tempo and with his own voice discovered and reaffirmed with astonishment the knowledge that all things are one thing and that one thing is all things—plankton, a shimmering phosphorescence on the sea and the spinning planets and an expanding universe, all bound together by the elastic string of time. It is advisable to look from the tide pool to the stars and then back to the tide pool again.”