Few human beings give of themselves to another as a dog gives of itself.

More to the point, I know why soldiers, home from war, seldom tell their families about their exploits in more than general terms. We who survive must go on in the names of those who fall, but if we dwell too much on the vivid details of what we've witnessed of man's inhumanity to man, we simply can't go on. perseverance is impossible if we don't permit ourselves to hope.

In misfortune lies the seed of future triumph.

Fire, ice, asteroids and pole shifts are bogeymen with which we distract ourselves from the real threat of our time. In an age when everyone invents his own truth, there is no community, only factions. Without community, there can be no consensus to resist the greedy, the envious, the power-mad narcissists who seize control and turn the institutions of civilization into a series of doom machines.

Change isn't easy. Changing the way you live means changing the way you think, means changing what you believe about life. That's hard.

...in an infinite universe, anything that could be imagined might somewhere exist.

My life has a mysterious purpose that I don't understand, and day by day, conflict by conflict, I learn by going where I have to go.