“My instincts told me that death would somehow be…different. But my rational mind reminded me that I had probably tempted fate one too many times. At least, I thought it was my rational mind. It sure seemed like the usual voice inside my head. Thank God there was only one of them.”

“It seems to me that my lack of faith is not, as I once thought, a triumph of the rational mind, but rather a failure of the imagination - an inability to tolerate mistery.”

“Many times, when I was having a hard time with one of my children, God would always remind me that He was having a harder time with me than I was with them”

“Like fanning through a deck of cards, my mind flashes on the thousand chances, trivial to profound, that converged to re-create this place. Any arbitrary turning along the way and I would be elsewhere; I would be different. Where did the expression "a place in the sun" first come from? My rational thought process cling always to the idea of free will, random event; my blood, however, streams easily along a current of fate. ”

“I didn't arrive at my understanding of the fundamental laws of the universe through my rational mind.”

“And then I thought that I had to be like Sherlock Holmes and I had to detach my mind at will to a remarkable degree so that I did not notice how much it was hurting inside my head.”