If you are anxious about death, then you don't have a sense of the oneness of things—you feel that after death, you will be no more. - Sidney Poitier

I was still unable to reconcile the uncontrollable passions of “want” and the unmovable insistence of “need” as they battled relentlessly over possession of my meager resources, with “want” winning out over “need” far more frequently than it should have.

And though she was devout in her faith, she wasn’t married to church doctrine, nor do I think that she actually recognized the fundamental differences between Anglican and Roman Catholic churches, and how the division came about. I don’t think she was aware that the king of England wanted to marry Anne Boleyn, and the Roman Catholic Church would not give him permission to get rid of his wife to do that. So he set up his own Anglican Catholicism. I’m pretty sure she didn’t know because my mother was not that versed a person. In fact, that was history I wouldn’t know much about until many years later.

We all have a capacity for love, for kindness, for passion. We also have a capacity for the opposite, but love is infinitely more effective in the world than hate, although they exist as equal opposites.