Every generation is its own secret society. - Kim Stanley Robinson

Anything divine must come to us in worldly clothing, and so it comes to us altered. The divine is like rain striking the earth, and all our efforts at godliness are therefore muddy—all but those few seconds of complete inundation, the moments that the mystics describe, when we are nothing but rain.

Beauty was the promise of happiness, not happiness itself; and the anticipated world was often more rich than anything real.

It is always the teacher who must learn the most … or else nothing real has happened in the exchange.