However awful the storm of my disappointment, it's a response that belongs to me. It's my heart, after all. My territory, my kingdom. And since I'm the only one with the authority to surrender it, I can also take it back.

You don’t return people’s smiles—it’s perfectly clear to you that people can smile and smile and still be villains.

This was a little house, with a ceiling that kept getting higher and higher, a hot place with no windows. This was anger.

I see all mythology as one tradition, a way of disseminating knowledge that must come to us in code so that we can live sanely with it, since some forms of knowledge are too dark, or too complex, to be plainly spoken. And so we have these weird (and also sometimes entertaining and surprising and heartening) tales that belong to all of us.

The language of [Catholic] mysticism - its repeated attempts to lay consciousness itself bare and speak all the intensely opposing yet interconnected parts of it that cannot be spoken.

Magic is an exercise of a pattern of thought (sometimes represented by a gesture, ritual, or the calling of a true name) that results in manifestation/s. But these patterns of thought can have so much to do with whimsy that magic often is jokes.

Because things grow. Wherever there is air and light and open space, things grow.