“Regardless of how dead we feel in a crowd, we cling to the uniquely American assumption that associating is good and necessary and solitude is suspect.”

“Thanks to the night, we long for the day; thanks to the day, we long for the night! The purpose of the opposites is to make us long for something! Thanks to the crowds, we long for the solitude; thanks to the solitude, we long for the crowds!”

“Yet in the American dream, where self reigns as King (or Queen), we have a dangerous tendency to misunderstand, minimize, and even manipulate the gospel in order to accomodate our assumptions and our desires. As a result, we desperately need to explore how much of our understanding of the gospel is American and how much is biblical.”

“How mutable are our feelings, and how strange is that clinging love we have of life even in the excess of misery!”

“Good" and "bad" describe the subjective feelings we have toward semothing; the words "true" or "false" deal with reality, regardless of our feelings.”

“In order to survive, we cling to all we know and understand. And label it reality. But knowledge and understanding are ambiguous. That reality could be an illusion. All humans live with the wrong assumptions. Isn't that another way of looking at it? That sharingan how much can you really se?”