Perhaps extreme danger strips us of all pretenses, all ambitions, all confusions, focusing us more intensely than we are otherwise ever focused, so that we remember what we otherwise spend most of our lives forgetting: that our nature and purpose is, more than anything else, to love and to make love, to take joy from the beauty of the world, to live with an awareness that the future is not as real a place for any of us as are the present and the past.

Dare we linger, dare we skate? Dare we laugh or celebrate, knowing we may strain the ice? Preserve the ice at any price?

Nothing is worse than being alone on the evening of the day when one's cow has exploded.

I am sustained by the certainty that life has meaning...as does death.

Only time conquers time and its burdens.

A fanatic is a nut who has something to believe in.

In our age, self-indulgence and self-destruction, rather than self-sacrifice, are the foundations for new heroic myths.