God isn't interested in watching you enact some performance of personality in order to comply with some crackpot notion you have about how a spiritual person looks or behaves. We all seem to get this idea that, in order to be sacred, we have to make some massive, dramatic change of character, that we have to renounce our individuality.

Zen masters say you cannot see your reflection in running water, only in still water.

Power is a neutral energy source, like tofu. It's what you do with it that gives it flavor.

Richard didn't even have time to ask if I thought I'd ever amount to anything in this life before I looked him eye to eye and said, "I already have, mister.

I crossed the street to walk in the sunshine.

I wanted to experience both. I wanted worldly enjoyment and divine transcendence. I wanted what the Greeks called kalos kai agathos, the singular balance of the good and the beautiful. I'd been missing both during these last hard years, because both pleasure and devotion require a stress-free space in which to flourish and I'd been living in a giant trash compactor of nonstop anxiety. As for how to balance the urge for pleasure against the longing for devotion...well, surely there was a way to learn that trick.

How could two people who were so in love not end up happily ever after? It had to work. Didn’t it?