Hierarchy, as in the Catholic Church, has to do with power, and vertical attention has to do with longing.

The distance between the adolescent and the true adult is about five thousand miles, but the distance between the adult and the elder is almost as large.

I think that poetry is important when you are shipwrecked, when the ordinary structures that hold you up are gone.

Sociological prose can tell you everything, but it can't point out the grief.

In ordinary life, a mentor can guide a young man through various disciplines, helping to bring him out of boyhood into manhood; and that in turn is associated not with body building, but with building and emotional body capable of containing more than one sort of ecstasy.

We make the path by walking.

In some Mayan villages they even have a stage beyond the elder that they call the Echo Person. They say that when an Echo Person, whether a man or a woman, speaks, the words echo both in this world and in the other world. That's why they are called Echo People.