To believe in something not yet proved and to underwrite it with our lives... - Lillian E. Smith

I keep thinking about the fragmented quality of human awareness: You take your blindness for granted most of the time then suddenly it stuns you: how little you see as you plunge ahead from minute to minute, day to day, year to year - vision cut down to the arc of a flickering flashlight, never sure how your words and acts are affecting someone else because you never really see that someone as he is. I know we should find even the most serene life unendurable were we to possess to any real degree those extrasensory perceptions which our grandmothers believed in...

When you stop learning, stop listening, stop looking and asking questions, always new question, then it is time to die

I soon realized that no journey carries one far unless, as it extends into the world around us, it goes an equal distance into the world within.