It's very strange that most people don't care if their knowledge of their family history only goes back three generations.

HISTORICAL SLUMMING: the act of visiting locations such as diners, smokestack industrial sites, rural villageslocations where time appears to have been frozen many years backso as to experience relief when one returns back to'the present'.

If you don't have a spiritual practice in place when times are good, you can't expect to suddenly develop one during a moment of crisis.

Remember: the time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself. Life's cruelest irony.

If God drives a car, He'd drive a 1973 Ford LTD Brougham sedan with a claret-colored vinyl roof, with oxblood leather upholstery and an opera window.

It was pivotal in making you but you don't remember it. Or do you? Do we understand the events that make us who we are? Do we understand the factors that make us do the things we do?

If I've learned anything in twenty-nine years, it's that every human being you see in the course of a day has a problem that's sucking up at least 70 percent of his or her radar. My gift - bad choice of words - is that I can look at you, him, her, them, whoever, and tell right away what is keeping them awake at night: money; feelings of insignificance; overwhelming boredom; evil children; job troubles; or perhaps death, in one of its many costumes, perched in the wings. What surprises me about humanity is that in the end such a narrow range of plights defines our moral lives.