I break up through the skin of awareness a thousand times a day, as dolphins burst through seas, and dive again, and rise, and dive.

All the green in the planted world consists of these whole, rounded chloroplasts wending their ways in water. If you analyze a molecule of chlorophyll itself, what you get is one hundred thirty-six atoms of hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen arranged in an exact and complex relationship around a central ring. At the ring's center is a single atom of magnesium. Now: If you remove the atom of magnesium and in its exact place put an atom of iron, you get a molecule of hemoglobin. The iron atom combines with all the other atoms to make red blood, the streaming red dots in the goldfish's tail.

The reader's ear must adjust down from loud life to the subtle, imaginary sounds of the written word. An ordinary reader picking up a book can't yet hear a thing; it will take half an hour to pick up the writing's modulations, its ups and downs and louds and softs.

Make connections; let rip; and dance where you can.

Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?

Time is the warp and matter the weft of the woven texture of beauty in space, and death is the hurling shuttle.

I know only enough of God to want to worship him, by any means ready to hand.