“...it is necessary to act within but to think beyond our received humanist tradition and, all the while, to imagine a much more complicated set of stories about the emergence of the now, in which what is foreclosed as unknowable is forever saturating the "what-can-be-known." We are left with the project of visualizing, mourning, and thinking "other humanities" within this received genealogy of "the human.”

“We all have a suspicion and hope that we've just been part of something special, something that may eventually change our lives. That no one else knows this makes it seem like we are living with a secret that we would like to share, but can't, sort of like having a superpower that's not come online or being president elect. For the moment, our lives proceed as usual, but within a month, we think, everything will change. It's a frustrating, if exciting, disconnect.”

“According to this model, human beings are, at least in one aspect, sensation-receiving machines; and although our receptory apparatus is competent to select and organize outward stimuli within the narrow range necessary for physical survival within our environment, it does not necessarily tell us very much about the nature of that environment. People, in other words, have little access to the possible world existing beyond their sensations.”

“If you are fortunate enough to be part of a hit, particularly a transcendent one, all emotional ownership is transferred from you to the audience. They judge it and embrace it; project their own hopes, dreams, and fears onto it; take their personal meaning from its themes, and with these investments it becomes theirs. The significance of your participation pales in comparison to the significance the project has on their imaginations.”

“I’ve never agreed with the conventional wisdom that ‘actors are great liars.’ If more people understood the acting process, the goals of good actors, the conventional wisdom would be ‘actors are terrible liars,’ because only bad actors lie on the job. The good ones hate fakery and avoid manufactured emotion at all costs. Any script is enough of a lie anyway. (What experience does any actor have with flying a spacecraft? Killing someone?) What’s called for, what actors are hired for, is to bring reality to the arbitrary.”

“We can't live our lives obsessing about the past or mourning the future. We have a responsibility to ourselves and to each other to live every moment of our lives the best we can.”

“Never imagine that what you do for others or what you do in private doesn't matter. It counts more than we know. God watches how we steward what is not our own before He entrusts us with more.”