Reclaiming the sacred in our lives naturally brings us close once more to the wellsprings of poetry.

Siblings tend not to care much about boundaries and borders. Having worn each others' T-shirts, it's unlikely that they'd go to war over a border.

When a father, absent during the day, returns home at six, his children receive only his temperament, not his teaching.

There are a lot of men who are healthier at age fifty then they have ever been before, because a lot of their fear is gone.

Transcendence or detachment, leaving the body, pure love, lack of jealousy-that's the vision we are given in our culture, generally, when we think of the highest thing. . . . Another way to look at it is that the aim of the person is not to be detached, but to be more attached-to be attached to working; to be attached to making chairs or something that helps everyone; to be attached to beauty; to be attached to music.

The world belongs primarily to the dead, and we only rent it from them for a little while. They created it, they wrote its literature and its songs, and they are deeply invested in how children are treated, because the children are the ones who will keep it going. The idea that each of us has the right to change everything is a deep insult to them.

The French still offer Sartre and Derrida rather than Pascal.