Of course, a culture as manically and massively materialistic as ours creates materialistic behavior in its people, especially in those people who've been subjected to nothing but the destruction of imagination that this culture calls education, the destruction of autonomy it calls work, and the destruction of activity it calls entertainment.

Open your heart, your gaze, to the visitations of angels, even if the gifts they bring may not be centeredness and balance but eccentricity and a wholly unfamiliar sense of pleasure called joy.

What I try to point out is the role an ordinary person can have in seeing the child's destiny. You have to have a feeling for the child.

I have found that the person with a sense of story built in from childhood is in better shape than one who has not had stories . . One knows what stories can do, how they can make up worlds and transpose existence into these worlds. . . .One learns that worlds are made by words and not only by hammers and wires.

If you are still being hurt by an event that happened to you at twelve, it is the thought that is hurting you now.

Beauty has never been an important topic in the writings of the major psychologists. In fact, for Jung, aesthetics is a weak, early stage of development. He follows the Germanic view that ethics is more important than aesthetics, and he draws a stark contrast between the two. Freud may have written about literature a bit, but an aesthetic sensitivity is not part of his psychology.

Our lives are determined less by our childhood than by the traumatic way we have learned to remember our childhoods.