"But let us remember that at the center of every religion is compassion, love, and forgiveness and at the periphery of every religious tradition is violence, cruelty, and war. Our vocation is to keep the periphery as far from the center as possible, to keep the hijackers of extremism at bay."

--Ira Zepp, Pedagogy of the Heart

" . . . time pushes at our backs like a centrifuge, forcing us outward and away, until it nudges us into oblivion [. . .] It's a law of motion, a fact of physics [. . .], no different from the stages of white dwarfs and red giants. Like all things in the universe, we are destined from birth to diverge. Time is simply the yardstick of our separation ( Read more... )

"Technology should be a familiar subject to us, after all; it lies at the heart of printing and book history. The most recent revolution, dazzling as it may appear in its purported transformation of how we pursue knowledge and communicate with each other, is only the third of three. The first technological revolution, the invention of writing, ( Read more... )

From the incomparable yuki_onna, who often writes these gems that make parts of my world suddenly turn on their axes and make *sense*.

On the nature of quests:

This was how it was done: you bare your belly to a great beast and endure trials and it all works itself out. There is treasure or a sword. Or a woman. And that thing is yours not because you ( Read more... )

A soldier stationed in Mississippi, about Katrina: "This hurricane was like God and the Devil fighting it out here with Godzilla as the referee."

"Everyone, after all, goes the same dark road -- and the road has a trick of being most dark, most treacherous, when it seems most bright -- and it's true that nobody stays in the garden of Eden. [. . .] Perhaps everybody has a garden of Eden, I don't know; but they have scarcely seen their garden before they see the flaming sword. Then, perhaps, ( Read more... )

"This is in the end the only kind of courage that is required of us: the courage to face the strangest, most unusual, most inexplicable experiences that can meet us."

"Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love."

--Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

"Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person (for what would a union be of two people who are unclarified, unfinished, and still incoherent--?), it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world in himself for the sake of another person; it ( Read more... )

"Data are not information. Information is data endowed with relevance and purpose. Knowledge is information endowed with application. Wisdom is knowledge endowed with age and experience."

-- Ken Davenport, Northeast Iowa Regional Library System, in a letter printed in the May 1, 2002, Library Journal (v. 127, no. 8, p. 10)

SOME SHADOWS ARE SO LONG THEY ARRIVE BEFORE THE LIGHT.