Science has made many advances in my lifetime, but the instrument has yet to be invented that can see clearly into the marriage of a man and a woman.

An introspective person seeks to attain a pure state of consciousness by merging finitude in infinity and by expressing the rapture of the soul through the contemplation and adoration of beauty. In this brief interlude of time, I surrender to becoming a cog in the roadway, an insentient time traveler, a ward of eternity, a day-tripper, a nighttime dream weaver, a blip in the cosmos, a freebase glob of energy, an imaginable disk of bundled vitality that wants for nothing.

While she lay there with these old worn thoughts coming obediently into her mind, called there by habit and the familiar quiet of early morning, she was aware that at the back of her mind there was another thought that was not at all stale, but so fresh that it was nearly a feeling, with all a feeling's delicious power to kill thought.

To attempt to know myself ‘apart’ from God is to choose to know nothing more than ‘a part’ of myself.

In evaluating ourselves, we tend to be long on our weaknesses and short on our strengths.

The problem is, we have too many cowardly, spineless, selfish people that would sacrifice their children’s future just to avoid the sacrifice love requires of them in the present. And they expect their children to respect them for that? Do they think we’re idiots just because we’re young?

.. We are not conscious of most things until we ask ourselves questions about them.

On the train I saw that world passing my window. It was when I came to see it was I who was passing that my self-centered childhood was over. But it was not until I began to write, that I found the world out there revealing, because memory had become attached to seeing, love had added itself to discovery, and because I recognized in my own continuing longing to keep going, the need I carried inside myself to know - the apprehension, first, and then the passion, to connect myself to it. Through travel I first became aware of the outside world; it was through travel that I found my own introspective way into becoming a part of it. This is, of course, simply saying that the outside world is the vital component of my inner life. My imagination takes its strength and guides its direction from what I see and hear and learn and feel and remember of my living world. But I was to learn slowly that both these worlds, outer and inner, were different from what they seemed to me in the beginning.

Periods of silent solitude spent in introspective reflecting are sacred and a source of great strength and comfort. We can learn from listening to the rhythms of nature and from appreciating the eternal hush of the cosmos.

By not letting me turn you into something you're not, you've helped me be more of myself.