Men who believe that they are accomplishing something by speaking speak in a different way from men who believe that speaking is a waste of time.

She's not afraid. She's wearing a dentata.

The full cosmos consists of the physical stuff and consciousness. Take away consciousness and it's only dust; add consciousness and you get things, ideas, and time.

It is easy to look at these waves, accomplishing so little and to think that no matter what efforts we put forth in our lives, all we're really doing is rearranging the sand grains in a beach that in essence never changes.

... when I saw any of those kinds of beauty I knew I was alive, and not just in the sense that when I hit my thumb with a hammer I knew I was alive, but rather in the sense that I was partaking of something--something was passing through me that it was in my nature to be a part of.

Most Kabbalists were theorists who were interested only in pure meditation. But there were so-called 'practical Kabbalists' who tried to apply the power of the Kabbalah in everyday life.

Early on, I settled on the first-person strategy as a way to deal with exposition and world-description issues. As long as the book is, it could have been far longer had I gone with an omniscient third-person narrator, or multiple point-of-view characters, since either of those would have enabled me to impart much more detailed information about the history and geography of the world.