But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars - compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things.

The other half is to dramatize the fact that we still "are" human beings, now. Or can be.

...the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.

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.

Truly decent, innocent people can be taxing to be around.

Good writing isn’t a science. It’s an art, and the horizon is infinite. You can always get better.

The assumption that you everyone else is like you. That you are the world. The disease of consumer capitalism. The complacent solipsism.