Every believer is an anarchist at heart. True believers would rather see governments topple and history rewritten than scuff the cover of their faith.

Whether you want to call it God or the mystery of the cosmos doesn't matter to me.

What is remembered is not a deed in stone but a metaphor. Meta = above. Pheren = to carry. That which is carried above the literalness of life. A way of thinking that avoids the problems of gravity. The word won't let me down. The single word that can release me from all that unuttered weight.

Every journey conceals another journey within its lines: the path not taken and the forgotten angle.

I like to look at how people work together when they are put into stressful situations, when life stops being cozy.

The ancients believed in fate because they recognized how hard it is for anyone to change anything. The pull of past and future is so strong that the present is crushed by it. We lie helpless in the force of patterns inherited and patterns re-enacted by our own behavior. The burden is intolerable.

When we say we can pull resources away from libraries, from culture, from those parts of the education system that are not about utility, what we are really saying is that the life of the mind is unnecessary.