When things are taking their ordinary course, it is hard to remember what matters.

I read things like theology, and I read about science, Scientific American and publications like that, because they stimulate again and again my sense of the almost arbitrary given-ness of experience, the fact that nothing can be taken for granted.

Salvation was universally considered to be much more becoming in women than in men.

I am grateful for all those dark years, even though in retrospect they seem like a long, bitter prayer that was answered finally.

I want to overhear passionate arguments about what we are and what we are doing and what we ought to do. I want to feel that art is an utterance made in good faith by one human being to another. I want to believe there are geniuses scheming to astonish the rest of us, just for the pleasure of it.

Sometimes I have loved the peacefulness of an ordinary Sunday. It is like standing in a newly planted garden after a warm rain. You can feel the silent and invisible life.

For our purposes as human beings, the mind is the center of everything.