After all, coffee is bitter, a flavor from the forbidden and dangerous realm.

We're dabbling in eugenics all the time, breeding ideal crops to replace less aesthetic or nutritious or hardy varieties; leveling forests to graze cattle or erect shopping malls and condos; planting groves of a few familiar trees that homeowners and industries prefer.

Nothing is more memorable than a smell. One scent can be unexpected, momentary and fleeting, yet conjure up a childhood summer beside a lake in the mountains...

We can't enchant the world, which makes its own magic; but we can enchant ourselves by paying deep attention

I don't want to get to the end of my life and find that I lived just the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.

Mystery causes a mental itch, which the brain tries to soothe with the balm of reasonable talk.

Despite not knowing if what he felt from moment to moment would pass or last forever, he entered fully into his shifting states of violent rage, self-pity, longing, heartbreak, cynicism, without losing the ability to think about what was happening to him. That took courage, I thought, living with the suffering in a mindful way, as an artifact of being, neither good nor bad.