“Being and stability are regarded by our contemporaries as akin to death; they cannot live unless they act, fret, or distract themselves with this or that. Their spirit (provided we can still talk about a spirit in their case) feeds only on sensations and on dynamism, thus becoming the vehicle for the incarnation of darker forces.”

“I believe that owning our worthiness is the act of acknowledging that we are sacred. Perhaps embracing vulnerability and overcoming numbing is ultimately about the care and feeding of our spirits.”

“With food, we feed our bodies. With family, we feed our spirits. And we are family.”

“What the semicolon's anxious supporters fret about is the tendency of contemporary writers to use a dash instead of a semicolon and thus precipitate the end of the world. Are they being alarmist?”

“I do not mean to imply that outside circumstances or other people do not play a role in our lives. Certainly, many factors influence the conditions we experience. But if we focus our attention solely upon those factors, we feed a spirit of fear and uncertainty regarding our future.”

“Not knowing how to feed the spirit, we try to muffle its demands in distraction...What matters is that one be for a time inwardly attentive.”