I don’t believe in being interested in a subject just because it’s said to be important. I believe in being caught by it somehow or other.

you salute Luke Skywalker in Star Wars for that moment when he says, “Turn off the computer and trust your feelings.”

Novels—great novels—can be wonderfully instructive.

slow-burning rapture all the time. This realization of life can be a constant realization in your living. When you find an author who really grabs you, read everything he has done. Don’t say, “Oh, I want to know what So-and-so did”—and don’t bother at all with the best-seller list. Just read what this one author has to give you.

read the right books by the right people. Your mind is brought onto that level, and you have a nice, mild,

Now I think one should go and say, “Bless me, Father, for I have been great, these are the good things I have done this week.” Identify your notion of yourself with the positive, rather than with the negative.

We’re so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget that the inner value, the rapture that is associated with being alive, is what it’s all about.

That is one of the amazing things about these myths. I have been dealing with this stuff all my life, and I am still stunned by the accuracies of the repetitions. It is almost like a reflex in another medium of the same thing, the same story. Instead of corn, or maize, it’s a coconut.

In a wasteland, people are fulfilling purposes that are not properly theirs but have been put upon them as inescapable laws. This is a killer. The