We have not yet encountered any god who is as merciful as a man who flicks a beetle over on its feet.

I sip my coffee. I look at the mountain, which is still doing its tricks, as you look at a still-beautiful face belonging to a person who was once your lover in another country years ago: with fond nostalgia, and recognition, but no real feelings save a secret astonishment that you are now strangers. Thanks. For the memories. It is ironic that the one thing that all religions recognize as separating us from our creator--our very self-consciousness--is also the one thing that divides us from our fellow creatures. It was a bitter birthday present from evolution, cutting us off at both ends.

Theirs is the mystery of continuous creation and all that providence implies: the uncertainty of vision, the horror of the fixed, the dissolution of the present, the intricacy of beauty, the pressure of fecundity, the elusiveness of the free, and the flawed nature of perfection.

For all the insularity of the old guard, Pittsburgh was always an open and democratic town.

Every spring he vowed to quit teaching school, and every summer he missed his pupils and searched for them on the streets.

The soul may ask God for anything, and never fail.

Ecstasy, I think, is a soul's response to the waves holiness makes as it nears.