“They seemed to have taken all of their smoothly cultivated ignorance, their exquisitely learned self-hatred, their elaborately designed hopelessness and sucked it all up into a fiery cone of scorn that had burned for ages in the hollows of their minds― cooled ―and spilled over lips of outrage, consuming whatever was in its path.”

“The truth, indeed, is out—but the ears to hear it and the minds to learn from it seem to have been atrophied by a cultivated ignorance and a nearly total loss of critical insight.”

“I hand over some files to and her eyes meet mine, all cool and sweet like a snow-cone in July.”

“To consume the Eucharist is an act of anticonsumption, for here to consume is to be consumed, to be taken up into participation in something larger than the self, yet in a way in which the identity of the self is paradoxically secured.”

“You think it's all rather too "New Age" to be taken seriously, eh?''Not at all.''But it's an ancient discipline...''New Age disciplines invariably are,' Beede said, disparagingly, 'but in the modern world they lack context - we just pick them up and then toss them back down again, we consume them. They have no moral claim on us. No moral value. And without that they're rendered meaningless, fatuous, even.”

“Half the business of modern education is taken up in learning not to be ignorant; a process peculiarly unfavorable both to strength of mind and pregnancy of imagination...”