The attempt to close the gap between what is known and what IS, is the temptation behind the apple in Genesis.

No culture has yet solved the dilemma each has faced with the growth of a conscious mind: how to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in all life, when one finds darkness not only in one’s own culture but within oneself.

Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.

Conversations are efforts toward good relations. They are an elementary form of reciprocity. They are the exercise of our love for each other. They are the enemies of our loneliness, our doubt, our anxiety, our tendencies to abdicate. To continue to be in good conversation over our enormous and terrifying problems is to be calling out to each other in the night. If we attend with imagination and devotion to our conversations, we will find what we need; and someone among us will act—it does not matter whom—and we will survive.

My function as a writer is to provide an atmosphere in which people can think wisely about what we're doing on this planet.

For so many centuries, the exchange of gifts has held us together. It has made it possible to bridge the abyss where language struggles.

It does not demean men to want to be what they imagine the wolf to be, but it does demean them to kill the animal for it.