The sin of inadvertence, not being alert, not quite awake, is the sin of missing the moment of life-live with unremitting alertness.

The adventure evoked a quality of his character that he didn't know he possessed.

I don't believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.

Participate joyfully in the sorrows of life

Mythological symbols touch and exhilarate centers of life beyond the reach of vocabularies of reason and coercion.

Midlife is when you reach the top of the ladder and find that it was against the wrong wall.

My writing is of a very different kind from anything I've heard about. All this mythological material is out there, a big gathering of stuff, and I have been reading it for some forty- or fifty-odd years. There are various ways of handling that. The most common is to put the material together and publish a scholarly book about it. But when I'm writing, I try to get a sense of an experiential relationship to the material. In fact, I can't write unless that happens ... I don't write unless the stuff is really working on me, and my selection of material depends on what works.