Words of divine consciousness: moral exaltation; lasting feelings of elevation, elation, joy; a quickening of the moral sense, which strikes one as more important than an intellectual understanding of things; an alignment of the universe along moral lines, not intellectual ones; a realization that the founding principle of existence is what we call love, which works itself out sometimes not clearly, not cleanly, not immediately, nonetheless ineluctably.

Just as music is noise that makes sense, a painting is colour that makes sense, so a story is life that makes sense.

He's a shy man. Life has taught him not to show off what is most precious to him.

The reason death sticks so closely to life isn’t biological necessity – it’s envy.

We are all born like Catholics, aren't we—in limbo, without religion, until some figure introduces us to God?

If you went to a home, kicked down the front door, chased the people who lived there out into the street and said, Go! You are free! Free as a bird! Go! Go! - do you think they would shout and dance for joy? They wouldn't. Birds are not free. The people you've just evicted would sputter, With what right do you throw us out? This is our home. We own it. We have lived here for years. We're calling the police, you scoundrel.

To me, the research is a way of exploring what it means to be alive.