the biggest threat to the religious experience may well come from organized religion itself.

Life is a thing that mutates without warning, not always in enviable ways. All part of the improbable adventure of being alive, of being a brainy biped with giant dreams on a crazy blue planet.

Culture is what people invent when they have lost nature.

And yet, words are the passkeys to our souls. Without them, we can't really share the enormity of our lives.

A self is a frightening thing to waste, it's the lens through which one's whole life is viewed, and few people are willing to part with it, in death, or even imaginatively, in art.

Violets smell like burnt sugar cubes that have been dipped in lemon and velvet.

I like handling newborn animals. Fallen into life from an unmappable world, they are the ultimate immigrants, full of wonder and confusion.