After this incident I got into the bad habit of treating her with courtesy and respect. Courtesy and respect are advisable when addressing a judge ri… - Steve Toltz

You experience life alone, you can be as intimate with another as much as you like, but there has to be always a part of you and your existence that is incommunicable; you die alone, the experience is yours alone, you might have a dozen spectators who love you, but your isolation, from birth to death, is never fully penetrated. What if death is the same aloneness, though, for eternity? An incommunicable, cruel, and infinite loneliness. We don't know what death is. Maybe it's that.

Dad always mentioned that people don't go on journeys at all but spend a lifetime searching for and gathering evidence to rationalize the beliefs they've held in their hearts since day one. They have new revelations, certainly, but these rarely shatter their core belief structure - they just build on it. He believed that if the base remains intact, it doesn't matter what you build on it, it is not a journey at all. It is just layering. He didn't believe that anyone ever started from scratch. "People aren't looking for answers," he often said. "They're looking for facts to prove their case."

People always say, "It's good to be a part of a something bigger than yourself," but you already are. You're part of a huge thing. The whole of humanity. That's enormous. But you can't see it, so you pick, what? An organization? A culture? A religion? That's not bigger than you. It's much, much smaller!