“To ponder is not to brood or grieve or even meditate. It is to wonder at a deep level.”

“They needed to grieve alone was what Tibby's dad said. Lena wondered if really there was any choice in that. Everyone grieved alone.”

“The books I like...contain things to ponder, ignore, memorize, and laugh and wonder at.”

“But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm; and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy.”

“Jesus lived a life of deep meditation. If thoughts and words were physical objects, meditation would be the act of holding, examining, taking apart, tasting, smelling, listening to, and savoring in order to study and become one.”

“The new kind of music seems to create not from the heart but from the head. Its composers think rather than feel. They have not the capacity to make their works exalt - they meditate, protest, analyze, reason, calculate and brood, but they do not exalt.”