hope and uncertainty [are] the twin ingredients necessary for romance to thrive. ... Nothing begins with so much excitement and hope, or fails as often, as love.

... love is an act of sedition, a revolt against reason, an uprising in the body politic, a private mutiny.

There is a way of beholding nature which is a form of prayer, a way of minding something with such clarity and aliveness that the rest of the world recedes. It . . . gives the brain a small vacation.

Wonder is the heaviest element on the periodic table. Even a tiny fleck of it stops time.

Who you are isn't tied solely to what you say, even though it may feel that way to you now.

I'm certainly not opposed to digital technology, whose graces I daily enjoy and rely on in so many ways. But I worry about our virtual blinders.

If a mind is just a few pounds of blood, urea, and electricity, how does it manage to contemplate itself, worry about its soul, do time-and-motion studies, admire the shy hooves of a goat, know that it will die, enjoy all the grand and lesser mayhems of the heart ?