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

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

The human species thinks in metaphors and learns through stories.

Human beings do not eat nutrients, they eat food.

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

...a disgruntled reflection on my own life as a sort of desperate improvisation in which I was constantly trying to make something coherent from conflicting elements to fit rapidly changing settings.

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.