“Pain is universal... yet personal”

“Being honest in a relationship is at times exceedingly difficult and painful. Yet the moment a person evades the truth, central fibers of the self pull away and the person initiates a process of deception - a way of manipulating the other person by preventing the person from discovering "real thoughts and real feelings”

“Not one person in a hundred knows how to be silent and listen, no, nor even to conceive what such a thing means. Yet only then can you detect, beyond the fatuous clamour, the silence of which the universe is made.”

“...magic was ugly—-a hard bargain with the universe, a calculus of pain.”

“The nonliving universe is as diverse and as dynamic as the living universe, and is also dominated by patterns of organization that are not yet understood.”

“Never take the universe personally.”