When a man is a mystery to himself you can hardly call him mysterious.

When I wake to the gift of yet another sunrise my first thought is to rouse him and say, I owe you the sight of morning.

Rituals, anthropologists will tell us, are about transformation. The rituals we use for marriage, baptism or inaugurating a president are as elaborate as they are because we associate the ritual with a major life passage, the crossing of a critical threshold, or in other words, with transformation.

You live it forward, but understand it backward.

When you win, you often lose, that's just a fact. There's no currency to straighten a warped spirit, or open a closed heart, a selfish heart.

The world turns on our every action, and our every omission, whether we know it or not.

The crookedness of the serpent is still straight enough to slide through the snake hole.