Art forms render ideas accessible to readers who could not receive those insights in any other format.

Gardening gave me a way to work with silence; not "in silence" but "with silence" - it was a silent creativity.

Of course we also live in a world of great beauty, sacrificial and passionate love, tenderness, prosperity, courage and joy. But quite a lot of all that seems to happen regardless of the paradigm and the high thoughts of philosophy. It has always happened. It is precisely because it has always happened that we go on wrestling with these issues in the hope that it can happen more often and for more people.

Art is an artificial organization of experience.

It is not simply that we share with each other a common humanity, but that individually we have no humanity without each other.

My father taught me to be independent and cocky and free thinking, but he could not stand it if I disagreed with him.

Another of the things I started to do during this time was what Buddhists normally call "meditation" or, in Christian terms, "contemplative prayer". It began to supersede deipnosophy as my favorite hobby.