“Quentin Schultze says that we have become like tourists who are so enamored by our mode of transportation that we cruise through nation after nation largely indifferent to the people and the cultures around us. We have our passports filled with the little stamps telling people just how many places we’ve been, but what is the purpose of being in places if we have not experienced them? And what is the purpose of knowing people if we do not care to know them on anything more than a surface level? The trend today is toward these fleeting, surface-level interactions”

“In a sense, all life is a prank. We are not who we appear to be and no one else is as they appear to be. So how can we handle that little mystery? This whole business about God – what’s that all about? No one knows anything about that either. So we have people who are not as they appear to be, telling us about something that they have no idea about. We really are on our own here to try and figure it out. That’s the real adventure of it. Some people are anxious to tell you what they know and have experienced. I’d rather hear from some people who admit to what they don’t know and haven’t experienced. They’re much more interesting.”

“Here is the truth: It matters, what you do at war. It matters more than you ever want to know. Because countries, like people, have collective consciences and memories and souls, and the violence we deliver in the name of our nation is pooled like sickly tar at the bottom of who we are. ... We may wish it were not so, but action amounts to identity. We become what we do.”

“What does it matter who a person is or who they have been? Let them think what they like. We're all so many people, aren't we, nowadays? So confusing it is, I don't know how anyone keeps track. There are the people we are inside, then the people we used to be, then there are the people other people think we are.”

“Why do we love to grind our axes so much? How does schlepping that heavy load of medieval weaponry around affect those we encounter in our daily routines? What if it makes us more likely to provoke others?What is so appealing about grinding our axes anyway? Why is it so difficult to stop? How would we interact with people differently if we didn’t do it?What other tools might we cultivate if most of us were willing to lay down our axes, even just for a little while? How much more energy might we have if we weren’t so encumbered?What would you do with that energy?”

“I have come to believe that by and large the human family all has the same secrets, which are both very telling and very important to tell. They are telling in the sense that they tell what is perhaps the central paradox of our condition—that what we hunger for perhaps more than anything else is to be known in our full humanness, and yet that is often just what we also fear more than anything else. It is important to tell at least from time to time the secret of who we truly and fully are—even if we tell it only to ourselves—because otherwise we run the risk of losing track of who we truly and fully are and little by little come to accept instead the highly edited version which we put forth in hope that the world will find it more acceptable than the real thing. It is important to tell our secrets too because it makes it easier that way to see where we have been in our lives and where we are going. It also makes it easier for other people to tell us a secret or two of their own, and exchanges like that have a lot to do with what being a family is all about and what being human is all about.”