“He thinks of all he has seen and learned: that the universe is indifferent to our human endeavors, that what gives our lives meaning is the passion that invades our hearts and burns in us, and maybe even destroys us.”

“Will once said each galaxy has about a hundred billion stars. He said that ninety-eight percent of what exists around us we can't even see. Sometimes I let go and float out there, staring back at earth. I lose track of time. Will told me to forget time, that it was relative. He said light was the thing. At the speed of light, time stands still. It's the wild card. It makes things happen. (The Speed of Light)”

“She was kahuna, creating more life around her than was actually there, heightening the momentousness of each living thing by simply gazing upon it.”

“Recognizing who you are is not the subtext of a life. It's the main point.”

“Man was first a hunter, and an artist: his early vestiges tell us that alone. But he must always have dreamed, and recognized and guessed and supposed, all the skills of the imagination. Language itself is a continuously imaginative act. Rational discourse outside our familiar territory of Greek logic sounds to our ears like the wildest imagination. The Dogon, a people of West Africa, will tell you that a white fox named Ogo frequently weaves himself a hat of string bean hulls, puts it on his impudent head, and dances in the okra to insult and infuriate God Almighty, and that there's nothing we can do about it except abide him in faith and patience.This is not folklore, or quaint custom, but as serious a matter to the Dogon as a filling station to us Americans. The imagination; that is, the way we shape and use the world, indeed the way we see the world, has geographical boundaries like islands, continents, and countries. These boundaries can be crossed. That Dogon fox and his impudent dance came to live with us, but in a different body, and to serve a different mode of the imagination. We call him Brer Rabbit.”

“He only knows great teachers can bore into someone else's mind like this -- only they have this kind of power. Maybe that's why teachers are paid so little: what they earn has more power than money.”

“Later it will occur to him that checking your feelings, holding them inside where they burn, is what a leader has to do. Every day.”