The fact is that ours is the only minority you can join involuntarily, without warning, at any time. And if you live long enough, as you're increasingly likely to do, you may well join it.

You don't have to want death in order to prepare for it.

The charity that begins at home cannot rest there but draws one inexorably over the threshold and off the porch and down the street and so out and out and out and out into the world which becomes the home wherein charity begins until it becomes possible, in theory at least, to love the whole of creation with the same patience, affection, and amusement one first practiced, in between the pouts and tantrums, with parents, siblings, spouse, and children.

From the moment of birth, at every level, human beings who are more alike than different become polarized into two absolutely exclusive classes with very different and ill-distributed symbolic powers.

Writing is not, alas, like riding a bicycle: it does not get easier with practice.

Who one believes God to be is most accurately revealed not in any credo but in the way one speaks to God when no one else is listening.

Do others, I wondered, "see things as I do? I do not think so, for if they did they would not still be alive." And, life-threatening though my vision seemed, I would not repudiate it: "Sometimes I think I shall die from being different even as I cling to the difference fiercely."