“... active wisdom--an entire cohort with something new to offer to the world as years of experience combined with continuing health. [p. 52]”

“To be mindful of social phenomena is thus to identify more clearly hatred, greed, and delusion as well as the seeds of wisdom and compassion both around us and in us. (p. 52)”

“Wisdom is not the same as information; it's something entirely different. It's often mistaken as good advise, but wisdom cannot be imparted to someone. Wisdom can only be earned; it's a by-product of experience, not necessarily knowledge.”

“It was as if the power and loneliness of the vampires' world had combined with the group oriented puppy-pile world of the shapeshifters and made something new.”

“It is a world completely rotten with wealth, power, senility, indifference, puritanism and mental hygiene, poverty and waste, technological futility and aimless violence, and yet I cannot help but feel it has about it something of the dawning of the universe. Perhaps because the entire world continues to dream of New York, even as New York dominates and exploits it.”

“Something is missing: that's as close as I can come to naming the sensation, an awareness of missed or thwarted connections, or of a great hollowness left where something lovely and solid used to be. ...There is something fundamentally insatiable about being human, as though we come into the world with a kind of built-in tension between the experience of being hungry, which is a condition of striving and yearning, and the experience of being fed, which may offer temporary satisfaction but always gives way to new strivings, new yearnings.”