What mattered to Abu was the music of the sentence. 'A shadow does not belong to the object that casts it.' To Abu, it was a little poem. And in general, it was the poetics, the music of things that tossed his confetti.

Of the Seven Dwarfs, the only one who shaved was Dopey. That should tell us something about the wisdom of shaving.

My personal motto has always been: Joy in spite of everything. Not just [mindless] joy, but joy in spite of everything. Recognizing the inequities and the suffering and the corruption and all that but refusing to let it rain on my parade. And I advocate this to other people.

If it is committed in the name of God or country, there is no crime so heinous that the public will not forgive it.

To one degree or another, everybody is connected to the Mystery, and everybody secretly yearns to expand the connection. That requires expanding the soul. These things can enlarge the soul: laughter, danger, imagination, meditation, wild nature, passion, compassion, psychedelics, beauty, iconoclasm, and driving around in the rain with the top down. These things can diminish it: fear, bitterness, blandness, trendiness, egotism, violence, corruption, ignorance, grasping, shining, and eating ketchup on cottage cheese.

Some folks hide and some folks seek, and seeking when its mindless, neurotic, desperate, or pusillanimous, can be a form of hiding.

A child's mind is its living room; it's is going to be residing there for the rest of its earthly existence.