“The myth of the Pujas is a simple one – full of rural sweetness. … The Pujas are, in part, an ever-returning homage to that magical sense of being rescued, so indispensable to children.”

“All right, he thought, so the details were not perfect. But maybe, in a sense, that was part of the magic, too.”

“Love me sweet
With all thou art
Feeling, thinking, seeing;
Love me in the Lightest part,
Love me in full Being.”

“The essence of Vedanta is that there is but one Being and that every soul is that Being in full, not a part of that Being.”

“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”

“It is accomplished by the oppressors depositing myths indispensable to the preservation of the status quo.”

“Even by proving that a certain view is indispensable for living well, one proves merely that the view in question is a salutary myth: one does not prove it to be true.”

“While early American society was an agrarian society, it was fast becoming more commercial, and commercial goals made their way among its agricultural classes almost as rapidly as elsewhere. The more commercial society became, however, the more reason it found to cling in imagination to the noncommercial agrarian values. The more farming as a self-sufficient way of life was abandoned for farming as a business, the more merit men found in what was being left behind. And the more rapidly the farmers' sons moved into the towns, the more nostalgic the whole culture became about its rural past. The American mind was raised upon a sentimental attachment to rural living and upon a series of notions about rural people and rural life that I have chosen to designate as the agrarian myth. The agrarian myth represents a kind of homage that Americans have paid to the fancied innocence of their origins.
Like any complex of ideas, the agrarian myth cannot be defined in a phrase, but its component themes form a clear pattern. Its hero was the yeoman farmer, its central conception the notion that he is the ideal man and the ideal citizen.”

“Simple answers to life’s questioning. That would be a magic beyond any I have ever been seeing.”

“The voice so sweet, the words so fair,
As some soft chime had stroked the air;
And, though the sound were parted thence,
Still left an echo in the sense.”