To sustain love, a man and a woman must continually be marrying and divorcing, moving with, against, away from, and beyond each other, saying 'yes' and 'no'.

The spiritual mind is always metaphorical. Spiritual thinking is poetic thinking. It's always trying to put a very diaphanous experience into words, realizing all the while that words are inadequate.

I think we have to trust ourselves in the darkness of not knowing. The God out of which we came and into which we go is an unknown God. It's the luminosity of that darkness and that unknowing that is, I think, the most human - and the most sacred - place of all.

It's perfectly possible to spend forty hours a week on a job that's meaningless, as long as you know what your real vocation is and find some way to express it. Then you won't confuse your job with the meaning of your life.

We come to love not by finding the perfect person, but by learning to see an imperfect person perfectly.

At thirty I lived in a world where death wasn't immediately real; it was always something "out there." My deeply held illusions of immortality - a product of my very conservative religious upbringing - were still pretty much intact.

Down to earth advice about the path that leads away from the kingdom of the hollow men.