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This Town

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thistownThis Town: Two Parties and a Funeral – Plus, Plenty of Valet Parking! – in America’s Gilded Capital, by New York Times reporter Mark Leibovich is one of the most depressing books I’ve read in a long time. Daily Show comic John Oliver: “This Town is funny, it’s interesting, and it is demoralizing … I loved it as much as you can love something which hurts your heart.”

Not matter how deep your cynicism, or how low your opinion of the people who run things in Washington D.C. — and the people who “report” on our government — this book will take you a little deeper into that cesspool. A few of my favorites from the book:

“…the members of The Club nourish the idea that the nation’s main actors talk to the same twelve people every day. They can evoke a time-warped sense of a political herd that never dies or gets older, only jowlier, richer, and more heavily made-up. Real or posed, these insiders have always been here— either these people literally or as a broader “establishment.” But they are more of a swarm now: bigger, shinier, online, and working it all that much harder.”

“The anti-Washington reflex in American politics has been honed for centuries, often by candidates who deride the capital as a swamp, only to settle into the place as if it were a soothing whirlpool bath once they get elected. The city exists to be condemned. … You still hear the term “public service” thrown around, but often with irony and full knowledge that “self-service” is now the real insider play.”

“Washington may not serve the country well but has in fact worked splendidly for Washington itself— a city of beautifully busy people constantly writing the story of their own lives.”

“I have lots of Washington friends and also some real ones.”

“You know someone big has died when they play “Amazing Grace” on the bagpipes.”

“The city of Washington feels like a conspiracy we’re all in together, and nobody else in America quite understands, even though they pay for it.”

“God just loves Washington; of that we are certain. His presence is indeed potent at the Kennedy Center, although everyone keeps looking around for someone more important to talk to.”

“Fly on the wall,” a journalistic practice that is both a cliché and a misnomer: no one notices an actual fly on the wall while everyone is fully mindful of the maggot reporter taking notes.”

“No single development has altered the workings of American democracy in the last century so much as political consulting,” Jill Lepore wrote in the New Yorker.”

“Political Washington is an inbred company town where party differences are easily subsumed by membership in The Club.”

“Whether journalists are gathered on a physical bus or reading a virtual document, it is a shared space. They are encountering the same names and characters and, after a while, acquiring a shared language and sensibility. “If there was a consensus,” Crouse wrote, “it was simply because all the national political reporters lived in Washington, saw the same people, used the same sources, belonged to the same background groups, and swore by the same omens. They arrived at their answers just as independently as a class of honest seventh-graders using the same geometry text— they did not have to cheat off each other to come up with the same answer.”

“Parallels between Facebook and D.C. come up a lot. Both are spaces to collect people, show off our shiny hordes, and leverage our “connections.” … Like D.C., Facebook is a vast and growing network, evolving and under some assault, but secure in its permanence as an empire.”

“By the middle of 2011, at least 160 former lawmakers were working as lobbyists in Washington, according to First Street, a website that tracks lobbying trends in D.C., in April 2013. The Center for Responsive Politics listed 412 former members who are influence peddling, 305 of whom are registered as federal lobbyists.”

Working for The Man

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David Cain — once again — delivers The Most Interesting Thing I’ve Read Today. From his interview with The Man:

“Do you know how people with hoards of money get to have those hoards of money? They make some money, and then they don’t spend it all. They keep some each time it comes in, and they use it to make more come in next time. That’s how power is accumulated. Instead of accumulating power, most of my employees accumulate objects in their homes, or they just burn the money as it comes in, on booze and expensive sandwiches. What I see is people setting up their lives such that they become dependent on powerful people like me, which is exactly the opposite of how one ought to build wealth. That’s why I’m The Man and they work for The Man.”

And how did The Man deal with rock and roll’s threat to The Establishment?

“I killed John Lennon. I bought MTV. And, thank God, Bob Dylan went and found Jesus.”

And one more…

“People in the US, more than anywhere else, respond to personal inadequacy by buying stuff or trying to get in a better position to buy stuff later. This is great, because buying stuff eventually creates disappointment, which creates more buying.”

The God Argument

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the-god-argumentThe God Argument (The Case Against Religion and for Humanism) by A. C. Grayling was a bit of a slow read for me, compared to a few other books I’ve read on this topic. This was, I believe, my first brush with secular humanism and it’s nice to have a basic definition of the concepts.

“Secularism is the principle of maintaining a separation between religious interests and bodies, on the one hand, and the state, on the other hand, on the premise that religion has no greater claim than any other self-interest outlook in debates about matters of government and public policy.”

“The basis of humanism is that we are to answer the most fundamental of all questions, the question of how to live, by reflection on the facts of human experience in the real world, and not on the basis of religion. […] As a broad ethical outlook, humanism involves no sectarian divisions or strife, no supernaturalism, no taboos, no food and dress codes, no restrictive sexual morality other than what is implicit in the demand to treat others with respect, consideration and kindness.”

Humanism’s two fundamental premises: 1) “there are no supernatural agencies in the universe,” 2) “our ethics must be drawn from, and responsive to, the nature and circumstances of human experience.”

“A key requirement (of humanism) is that individuals should think for themselves about what they are and how they should live. […] It imposes no obligations on people other than to think for themselves.”

Same for stoicism which, at first glances, seems to share some ideas with Buddhism.

“Stoicism’s main doctrine was that one should cultivate two capacities: ‘indifference’, and self-control. They used the term ‘indifference’ in the strict sense of this term to men neutrality, detachment, as in not taking sides on a question, or being disengaged from a quarrel.”

A few more ideas that got some highlighter »
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Scott Adams: Universe as computer simulation

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Three of my favorite Smart People (Kevin Kelly, Ray Kurzweil and Scott Adams) have convinced me there will be a post-human stage in our evolution. And Scott Adams makes a compelling (to me) case for the computer simulation theory.

“The theory basically goes that any civilisation which could evolve to a ‘post-human’ stage would almost certainly learn to run simulations on the scale of a universe. And that given the size of reality – billions of worlds, around billions of suns – it is fairly likely that if this is possible, it has already happened. And if it has? Well, then the statistical likelihood is that we’re located somewhere in that chain of simulations within simulations. The alternative – that we’re the first civilisation, in the first universe – is virtually absurd.”

Before you dismiss this theory, compare it to this popular creation narrative:

“It is made up of two parts, roughly equivalent to the first two chapters of the Book of Genesis. In the first part, Genesis 1:1 through Genesis 2:3, Elohim, the generic Hebrew word for God, creates the world in six days, then rests on, blesses and sanctifies the seventh day. God creates by spoken command (“Let there be…”), suggesting a comparison with a king, who has only to speak for things to happen, and names the elements of the cosmos as he creates them, in keeping with the common ancient concept that things did not really exist until they had been named. In the second, Genesis 2:4–24, Yahweh, the personal name of God, shapes the first man from dust, places him in the Garden of Eden, and breathes his own breath into the man who thus becomes נֶפֶש nephesh, a living being; man shares nephesh with all creatures, but only of man is this life-giving act of God described. The man names the animals, signifying his authority within God’s creation, and God creates the first woman, Eve, from the man’s body.”

Mockingbird, by Walter Tevis

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Mockingbird(1stEd)“In the vast and cluttered factory room where he was brought into awareness his dark eyes looked around him with excitement and life. He was on a stretcher when he first experienced the power of consciousness enveloping his nascent being like a wave, becoming his being. His constricted throat gagged and then cried out at the force of it — at the force of being in the world.”

“Spofforth had been designed to live forever, and he had been designed to forget nothing. Those who made the design had not paused to consider what a life like that might be like.”

“The idea of the sequence of events and circumstances — that things had no always beenthe same — was one of the strange and striking things that had occurred to me as I had become aware of what I can only call the past. […] I feel that I understand a good many things since I have begun to memorize my life You get the sense that one thing comes after another and that there is change.”

“Then he removed my handcuffs, with a surprisingly gentle touch, and had me place my right hand in the Truth Hole that sat directly in front of me. He said quietly, “For each lie you tell, a finger will be severed. Answer the judge with care.”

“And they read, hearing the voices of the living and the dead speaking to them in eloquent silence, in toucnh with a babble of human talk that must have filled the mind in a manner that said: I am human, I talk and I listen and I read.”

“Sadness. Sadness. But I will embrace the sadness, and make it a part of this life I am memorizing.”

“When the drugs and the television were perfected by the computers that made and distributed them, the cars were no longer necessary.”

“I would like to know, before I die, what it was like to be the human being I have tried to be all my life.”

“I think now that they expected something miraculous to happen when they started to hear the words from the Bible read aloud, opening up that mystery to them—the message of an inscrutable book they had learned to revere. But no miracle occurred, and they soon lost any real interest. I think that to know what those words said required an attention and a devotion that none of them possessed. They were willing to accept their stringent piety, and silence, and sexual restraints, all unthinkingly, along with a few platitudes about Jesus and Moses and Noah; they were overwhelmed, however, at the effort it would require to understand the literature that was the real source of their religion.”

“I no longer wanted to keep my mind silent, or use it as a vehicle for disconnected pleasure; I wanted to read, and think and talk.”

“My mind racing with the realization that all my notions of decency were something programmed into my mind and my behavior by computers and by robots who themselves had been programmed by some long-dead social engineers or tyrants or fools.”

“Whatever may happen to me, thank God I can read, that I have truly touched the minds of other men.”

“All of those books — even the dull and nearly incomprehensible ones — have made me understand more clearly what it means to be a human being.”

“It (the Empire State Building) is only a marker, a mute testimoney to the human ability to make things that are too big.”

Wikipedia

I Am That by Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

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Excerpts from I Am That by Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

All your problems are your body’s problems. All these lose their meaning the moment you realize that you may not be a mere body. You are nothing perceivable, or imaginable.#

Memory creates the illusion of continuity.

Time, space, causation are mental categories, arising and subsiding with the mind.

Nothing can happen unless the entire universe makes it happen. A thing is as it is, because the universe is as it is.

The world you can perceive is a very small world indeed. And it is entirely private. Take it to be a dream and be done with it.

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Be As You Are by Sri Ramana Maharshi

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Excerpts from The Teachings of Sri Ramana Maharshi (Edited by David Godman)

There is a single immanent reality, directly experienced by everyone, which is simultaneously the source, the substance and the real nature of everything that exists.

The Self is not an experience of individuality but a non-personal, all-inclusive awareness.

Sri Ramana’s God is not a personal God, he is the formless being which ustains the universe. He is not the creator of the univers, the universe is merely a manifestation of his inherent power; he is inseparable from it.

The mind turned inward is the Self; turned outwards, it becomes the ego and all the world.

The thoughts are the content of the mind and they shape the universe.

To make room, it is enough that objects be removed. Room is not brought in from elsewhere.

Bliss is not added to your nature, it merely revealed as your true natural state.

Trouble and pleasure are only for the ego.

The state free from thoughts is the only real state.

It is the mind that veils our happiness.

Self-realisation could be brought about merely by giving up the idea that there is an individual self which functions through the body and the mind.

The aim of self-enquiry is to discover, by direct experience, that the mind is non-existent.

The mind and the ego are one and the same.

When the mind unceasingly investigates its own nature, it transpires that there is no such thing as mind. The mind is merely thoughts. The mind is only they thought ‘I’

The ego functions as the knot between the Self which is pure consciousness and the physical body which is inert and insentient.

The essence of mind is only awareness or consciousness. When the ego, however, dominates it, it functions as the reasoning, thinking or sensing faculty.

Realisation is nothing new to be acquired. It is already there, but obstructed by a screen of thoughts.

Reality is simply the loss of ego.

As the practice develops the thought ‘I’ gives way to a subjectively experienced feeling of ‘I’, and when this feeling ceases to connect and identify with thoughts and objects, it completely vanishes. What remains is an experience of being in which the sense of individuality has temporarily ceased to operate.

It is not an exercise in concentration, nor does it aim at suppressing thoughts; it merely invokes awareness of the source from which the mind springs. … From then on it is more a process of being than doing, of effortless being rather than an effort to be. … Ultimately, the Self is not discovered as a result of doing anything, but only by being.

If you are vigilant and make a stern effort to reject every thought when it arises you will soon find that you are going deeper and deeper into your own inner self.

You have to ask yourself question “Who am I?’ This investigation will lead in the end to the discovery of something within you which is behind the mind. Solve that great problem and you will solve all other problems.

One must be completely free of the idea that there is an individual person who is capable of acting independently of God.

(The) final destruction of the ‘I’ takes place only if the self-surrender has been completely motiveless.

If one surrenders oneself there will be no one to ask questions or to be thought of.

You must be satisfied with whatever God gives you and that means having no desires of your own. You can have no likes or dislikes after your surrender.

It is the higher power that does everything, and man is only a tool.

The Self does not move, the world moves in it.

Pleasure or pain are aspects of the mind only. Our essential nature is happiness. But we have forgotten the Self and imagine that the body or the mind is the Self.

So long as there is thought there will be fear. #

The ego is the source of thought. #

Because you identify yourself with the body, you think that work is done by you.

We must play our parts on the stage of life, but we must not identify ourselves with those parts. #

Many a man would be only too glad to be rid of his diseased body and all the problems and inconveniences it creates for him if continued awareness were vouchsafed to him. It is the awareness, the consciousness, and not the body, he fears to lose.

One first creates out of one’s mind and then sees what one’s mind itself has created.

Clearly the world is your thought. Thoughts are your projections. The ‘I’ is first created and then the world. The world is created by the ‘I’ which in its turn rises up from the Self. (We) must admit that the world is (our) own imagination.

The universe is real if perceived as the Self.

You do not know what you were before birth, yet you want to know what you will be after death. Do you know what you are now?

Experience takes place only in the present, and beyond experience nothing exists. Even the present is mere imagination, for the sense of time is purely mental. Space is similarly mental. Therefore birth and rebirth, which take place in time and space, cannot be other than imagination. Real rebirth is dying from the ego into the spirit.

Birth pertains to the ego, which is an illusion of the mind.

God never acts, he just is. He has neither will nor desire. … The totality of all lthings and beings constitutes God.

Whatever this body is to do and whatever experiences it is to pass through was already decided when it came into existance.

As long as individuality lasts there is free will. … Only the ego is bound by destiny and not the Self.

Surrender can never be regarded as complete so long as the devotee wants this or than from the Lord.

Jesus, Interrupted

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The full title of the book is: Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (And Why We Don’t Know About Them). The author, Bart D. Ehrman, began studying the Bible and its original languages at the Moody Bible Institute and is a 1978 graduate of Wheaton College in Illinois. He received his PhD and M.Div. from Princeton Theological Seminary, where he studied under Bruce Metzger. He received magna cum laude for both his BA in 1978 and PhD in 1985.

I have not read the Bible and — before reading this book — knew almost nothing about it from an historical, scholarly perspective. Here are a few excerpts I highlighted:

The New Testament, consisting of twenty-seven books, was written by maybe sixteen or seventeen authors over a period of seventy years.
…
A Christianity dependent on the inerrancy of the Bible probably cannot survive the reality of the discrepancies.
…
Since the nineteenth century, scholars have recognized that Mark was the first Gospel to be written, around 65-70 CE. Continue reading →

The Power of Now

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I read Eckhart Tolle’s classic The Power of Now in August of 2010. My usual practice for books like this is to highlight passages I find interesting and share them here. I highlighted so many parts of this book, I never go around to it. If you haven’t read the book, the lack of context will make most of these seem, well, just weird. I can assure you everyone line has been valuable to me.

nothing I ever did could possibly add anything to what I already had.

Self = a fiction of the mind

You have it already. You just can’t feel it because your mind is making too much noise.

the knower in you who dwells behind the thinker

All I can do is remind you of what you have forgotten.

Not to be able to stop thinking is a dreadful affliction.

You believe that you are your mind. This is the delusion.

The beginning of freedom is the realization that you are not the possessing entity — the thinker. Knowing this enables you to observe the entity. The moment you start watching the thinker, a higher level of consciousness becomes activated. You then begin to realize that there is a vast realm of intelligence beyond thought, that thought is only a tiny aspect of that intelligence. You also realize that all the things that truly matter — beauty, love, creativity, joy, inner peace — arise from beyond the mind. You begin to awaken.

The voice isn’t necessarily relevant to the situation you find yourself in at the time; it may be reviving the recent or distant past or rehearsing or imagining possible future situations. Here it often imagines things going wrong and negative outcomes; this is called worry. This is because the voice belongs to your conditioned mind.

“watching the thinker” — listen to the voice in your head, be there as the witnessing presence. … The thought then loses its power over you and quickly subsides, because you are no longer energizing the mind through identification with it.

aware but not thinking. This is the essence of meditation.

Because you are identified with it … you derive your sense of self from the content and activity of your mind. Because you believe that you would cease to be if you stopped thinking.

(Ego) a false self, created by unconscious identification with the mind. (It) can only be kept going through constant thinking.

Even when the ego seems to be concerned with the present, it is not the present that it sees: It misperceives it completely because it looks at it through the eyes of the past. Or it reduces the present to a means to an end, an end that always lies in the mind-projected future. The present moment holds the key to liberation. But you cannot find the present moment as long as you are your mind.

Thinking and consciousness are not synonymous. Thinking is only a small aspect of consciousness. Thought cannot exist without consciousness, but consciousness does not need thought.

The mind is essentially a survival machine. It is not at all creative.

Emotion (is) the body’s reaction to the mind.

If there is an apparent conflict between them, the thought will be the lie, the emotion will be the truth.

You will not be free of pain until you cease to derive your sense of self from identification with the mind, which is to say from ego.

Glimpses of love and joy or brief moments of deep peace are possible whenever a gap occurs in the stream of thought. Usually, such moments are short-lived, as the mind quickly resumes its noise-making activity that we call thinking.

Pleasure is always derived from something outside you, whereas joy arises from within.

Become present. Be there as the observer of the mind.

The pain that you create now is always some form of nonacceptance, some form of unconscious resistance to what is.

The mind always seeks to deny the Now and to escape from it. In other words, the more you are identified with your mind, the more you suffer.

Time and mind are in fact inseparable. … The mind, to ensure that it remains in control, seeks continuously to cover up the present moment with past and future,

Unconscious = a complete absence of the watcher.

You can always cope with the present moment, but you cannot cope with something that is only a mind projection — you cannot cope with the future.

ultimately all fear is the ego’s fear of death,

End the delusion of time. Time and mind are inseparable. Remove time from the mind and it stops

Nothing ever happened in the past; it happened in the Now.
Nothing will ever happen in the future; it will happen in the Now.

In the Now, in the absence of time, all your problems dissolve.

The moment you realize you are not present, you are present. Whenever you are able to observe your mind, you are no longer trapped in it.

Usually, the future is a replica of the past.

Ultimately, this is not about solving your problems. It’s about realizing that there are no problems. Only situations — to be dealt with now, or to be left alone and accepted as part of the “isness” of the present moment until they change or can be dealt with. Problems are mind-made and need time to survive. They cannot survive in the actuality of the Now.

it is impossible to have a problem when your attention is fully in the Now

The mind unconsciously loves problems because they give you an identity of sorts

Everything is honored, but nothing matters.

To complain is always nonacceptance of what is. … leave the situation or accept it. All else is madness.

Die to the past every moment. You don’t need it. Only refer to it when it is absolutely relevant to the present.

You can always cope with the Now, but you can never cope with the future — nor do you have to. The answer, the strength, the right action or the resource will be there when you need it, not before, not after.

Eternity does not mean endless time, but no time.

Being cannot become an object of knowledge.

You are cut off from Being as long as your mind takes up all your attention. When this happens — and it happens continuously for most people — you are not in your body. The mind absorbs all your consciousness and transforms it into mind stuff. You cannot stop thinking. Compulsive thinking has become a collective disease. Your whole sense of who you are is then derived from mind activity

Feeling will get you closer to the truth of who you are than thinking.

As there is more consciousness in the body, its molecular structure actually becomes less dense. More consciousness means a lessening of the illusion of materiality.

when presence becomes your normal mode of consciousness and past and future no longer dominate your attention, you do not accumulate time anymore in your psyche and in the cells of the body. The accumulation of time as the psychological burden of past and future greatly impairs the cells’ capacity for self-renewal.

see yourself surrounded by light or immersed in a luminous substance — a sea of consciousness. Then breathe in that light. Feel that luminous substance filling up your body and making it luminous also.

nothing in this world is so like God as silence

You “get” there by realizing that you are there already. You find God the moment you realize that you don’t need to seek God.

the moment that judgment stops through acceptance of what is, you are free of the mind.

Ego is the unobserved mind that runs your life when you are not present as the witnessing consciousness, the watcher.

You cannot have an argument with a fully conscious person.

The whole advertising industry and consumer society would collapse if people became enlightened and no longer sought to find their identity through things.

every moment — is the best. That is enlightenment.

there is no objective world out there. Every moment, your consciousness creates the world that you inhabit.

Only those who have transcended the world can bring about a better world.

who you are is always a more vital teaching and a more powerful transformer of the world than what you say, and more essential even than what you do.

to surrender is to accept the present moment unconditionally and without reservation.

You are walking along a path at night, surrounded by a thick fog. But you have a powerful flashlight that cuts through the fog and creates a narrow, clear space in front of you. The fog is your life situation, which includes past and future; the flashlight is your conscious presence; the clear space is the Now.

Surrender does not transform what is, at least not directly. Surrender transforms you. When you are transformed, your whole world is transformed, because the world is only a reflection.

The amazing and incomprehensible fact is not that you can become conscious of God but that you are not conscious of God.

 

Random Walk

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randomwalkAuthor Lawrence Block on Random Walk: “Every now and then someone comes up to me at a speech or signing and says one of two things. ‘I’ve liked all your books,’ I’ll be told, ‘but there was one I couldn’t make heads or tails out of.’ Or just the opposite: ‘I’ve read most of your books, but there was one that really knocked me for a loop, and I’ve read it seventeen times now, and it’s completely changed my life.’ “It’s always the same book. Random Walk.”

I wrote the book in the spring of 1987, and never was a book more eager to be written. Paradoxically, never was a book less eager to be read–the advance sale was light, the reviews were venomous, and most readers never even knew the book existed. Now it’s getting a new lease on life, and I’m delighted. I don’t know that it’s time has come–it’s just as possible it’s time has come and gone. But I do know Random Walk has enormous impact on some of the people who read it, and I hope that now they’ll have a chance to find it.”

A few of my favorite passages:

“You could take a walk, a voice in his head said.”

“We’ll know more when we have to know more. You know what it’s like? It’s like driving at night. You can only see as far as the headlights reach, but you can go all the way across the country that way.”

“The universe was endorsing her action by cooperating at every turn.”

“Don’t work things out, don’t try to think your way through it. Just listen, and you’ll always know where to go.”

“He seemed to have given up deciding things, he realized. It looked as though the only way for him to find out what he was going to do was to wait and see what he did.”

“What part is the river? The water? But it’s only in the river for a while. It flows in from some other stream and flows out into the Gulf of Mexico. There’s always new water coming in and old water flowing out. So what’s the river? The land on either side is the bank of the river, the mud underneath is the bottom of the river, but what’s the river? I think the river’s a certain time and space, and sooner or later every drop of water in the world gets to take its turn being a part of it. And then they go somewhere else. This drop goes to the Gulf, and this drop evaporates, and somebody drinks this drop—. A little of the world’s energy is gathered up into a river and the water makes sure it’s never empty.”

“Nobody gets anything from this walk that he didn’t come here to get. The thing is, the only way you’ll know what you came for is when you see what you get.”

“Once you start on the path, I don’t think you can really stop. You can slow down, you can get sidetracked, you can drag your feet, but I don’t think you can turn your back on it completely.”

“People have so goddam much to walk away from. Every time I find myself wondering what we’re talking toward, I tell myself that’s beside the point.”

“There’s no order of difficulty in miracles. They’re all impossible.”

“We’re all becoming the people we really were all along.”

“It was impossible, it had happened, impossible things did not happen, and therefore… therefore what?”

“You know that line, ‘It’s a lousy job but somebody has to do’? If it’s really a lousy job, then nobody has to do it.”

“A leap of faith (is) never from Point A to Point B. A leap of faith is from Point A.”

“If he couldn’t stretch his mind, he could at least protect himself by closing his eyes.”

“He felt as though he had let go of the steering wheel of life.”

“You did what you would have done, in a minute or in all eternity.”

“The only way to find out what you deserve is to wait and see what you get.”