To put your hands in a river is to feel the chords that bind the earth together.

If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox.

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

We simply do not understand our place in the universe and have not the courage to admit it.

To allow mystery, which is to say to yourself, 'There could be more...things we don't understand,' is not to damn knowledge....It is to permit yourself an extraordinary, freedom: someone else does not have to be wrong in order that you might be right...This tolerance for mystery invigorates the imagination; and it is the imagination that gives shape to the universe.

There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions.

I lay there knowing something eerie ties us to the world of animals. Sometimes the animals pull you backward into it. You share hunger and fear with them like salt in blood.