The desire for perfect release and the real-world impossibility of perfect, whenever-you-want-it release had together produced a tension they could no longer stand.

The point here is ... to be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded.

In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.

Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty.

To make someone an icon is to make him an abstraction, and abstractions are incapable of vital communication with living people.

There's a weird kind of paradox that the more expensive the vacation is, the more potentially anxiety-producing it is.

He said she went around with her feelings out in front of her with an arm around the feelings' windpipe and a Glock 9mm. to the feelings' temple like a terrorist with a hostage, daring you to shoot.