None of us knows how we will cope with snakes until the moment arises, and then most of us find out that we do not do it very well.

It seems to me that we're in danger of losing sight of certain basic civic values in society by allowing the growth of a whole generation of people who really have no sense of attachment to society.

I'm very interested in tea. I wouldn't mind being involved in some aspect of the tea industry.

We should be careful of the insults we fling at others, lest they return and land at our feet, newly minted to apply to those who had first coined them.

It was the same with friendship. Disagreement between friends and spouses, too had to be carefully handled. If the time you spent with friends was consumed by disagreement, then there was no room for the essence of friendship, which was a sharing of the world. And that sharing involved seeing things the same way, or at least seeing things through the eyes of the friend.

Ritual is a terribly important, binding cement in a society. If we abandon formality and rituals, we're actually weakening the relationships that exist between people that bind.

A life without stories would be no life at all. And stories bound us, did they not, one to another, the living to the dead, people to animals, people to the land?