What happens and what you encounter, what you collide with - it's so exciting and revealing about how much more interesting and tricky the universe is than we think in our daily lives.

God is an experience of supreme love.

Americans have an inability to relax into sheer pleasure.Ours is an entertainment seeking-nation, but not necessarily a pleasure-seeking one....This is the cause of that great sad American stereotype- the overstressed executive who goes on vacation, but who cannot relax.

I've read that under trauma, that you have this ability to kind of disconnect from the experience.

I will tell you why we have these extraordinary minds and souls, Miss Whittaker," he continued, as though he had not heard her. "We have them because there is a supreme intelligence in the universe, which wishes for communion with us. This supreme intelligence longs to be known. It calls out to us. It draws us close to its mystery, and grants us these remarkable minds, in order that we try to reach for it. It wants us to find it. It wants union with us, more than anything.

Take me someplace where we can be silent together.

So sadness is a place?' Giovanni asked. 'Sometimes people live there for years,'I said.