When parents die, all of the partings of the past are reevoked with the realization that this time they will not return.

Worlds can be found by a child and an adult bending down and looking together under the grass stems or at the skittering crabs in a tidal pool.

Human beings tend to regard the conventions of their own societies as natural, often as sacred.

The timing of death, like the ending of a story, gives a changed meaning to what preceded it.

Orthodox Judaism is a thicket of detailed injunctions, Biblical commandments elaborated during centuries of prohibited proselytizing, functioning to limit interaction with outsiders. At the opposite extreme, Islam, still the most rapidly expanding of faiths, demands little immediate knowledge from those who would convert. The convert is permitted to enter and then to learn by participation, although there are plenty of detailed regulations and abstruse theological ideas to be pursued later, and the regulations do effectively separate believers from nonbelievers.

There are few things as toxic as a bad metaphor. You can't think without metaphors.

The past empowers the present, and the sweeping footsteps leading to this present mark the pathways to the future.