There are no events but thoughts and the heart's hard turning, the heart's slow learning where to love and whom. The rest is merely gossip, and tales for other times.

I had been chipping at the world idly, and had by accident uncovered vast and labyrinthine further worlds within it.

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

The way you live your days is the way you live your life.

There is no whit less enlightenment under the tree by your street than there was under the Buddha's bo tree. I invite you to go sit under that tree by your street.

Skin was earth; it was soil. I could see, even on my own skin, the joined trapezoids of dust specks God had wetted and stuck with his spit the morning he made Adam from dirt. Now, all these generations later, we people could still see on our skin the inherited prints of the dust specks of Eden.

You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then-and only then-it is handed to you.