"The answer must be, I think, that the beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there."

"I want to climb up the blank blue dome as a man would storm the inside of a circus tent, wildly, dangling, and with a steel knife claw a rent in the top, peep, and, if I must, fall."

"If, as Heraclitus suggests, god, like an oracle, neither "declares nor hides, but sets forth by signs," then clearly I had better be scrying the signs."

"I set up and staged hundreds of ends-of-the-world and watched, enthralled, as they played themselves out."

"The sense impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for the brain: ‘This is philosophically interesting in a rather mournful way, since it means that only the simplest animals perceive the universe as it is (21)."

"The world knew you before you knew the world."