Most Americans pay lip service to the idea of freedom, but can't handle real freedom.

...to emphasize the afterlife is to deny life. To concentrate on Heaven is to create hell. In their desperate longing to transcend the disorderliness, friction, and unpredictability that pesters life; in their desire for a fresh start in a tidy habitat, germ-free and secured by angels, religious multitudes are gambling the only life they may ever have on a dark horse in a race that has no finish line.

Alone, the world offers itself freely to us. To be unmasked, it has no choice.

My desire was no less than before, you understand, but I no longer identified with the desire. Perhaps that is why taking them too seriously, we not only increase our susceptibility to disappointment, we actually create a climate inhospitable to the free and easy fulfillment of those desires.

Summer had come to sit on New York's face.

Not naive,' Conch shell had corrected him. 'He simply has not been taught to fear the things you fear.

The loony legacy of money was that the arithmetic by which things were measured had become more valuable than the things themselves.