I was trapped in admiration for what I had once admired, as a fly in amber remains the captive of some long-vanished pine.

Hope is a psychological mechanism unaffected by external realities.

We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges.

I don't think anyone is more intrinsically holy. People experience God in many ways; and it seems to me that God does what the rest of us do: He chooses the means that best gets His message across.

Then I could not help wondering what the watching gods thought of us, with our clever masks and our jokes. What we think of crickets, perhaps, whose singing we hear with pleasure, though some of us smash them with our heels when they venture into sight.

Religion and science have always been matters of faith in something. It is the same something.

Have a short story feature two situations, and then let them solve each other.