As for my father, I never knew whether he believed God was a mathematician but he certainly believed God could count and that only by picking up God's rhythms were we able to regain power and beauty. Unlike many Presbyterians, he often used the word "beautiful.

We can love completely what we cannot completely understand.

Now nearly all those I loved and did not understand when I was young are dead, but I still reach out to them.

How can a question be answered that asks a lifetime of questions.

Unless we are willing to escape into sentimentality or fantasy, often the best we can do with catastrophes, even our own, is to find out exactly what happened and restore some of the missing parts.

A mystery of the universe is how it has managed to survive with so much volunteer help.

When I was young, a teacher had forbidden me to say "more perfect" because she said if a thing is perfect it can't be more so. But by now I had seen enough of life to have regained my confidence in it.