“It is saying these things that keeps us from falling apart. And maybe by imagining these futures we can make them real, and maybe not, but either way we must imagine them. The light rushes out and floods in.”

“I would like to tell them, the graduates, all of this, and I know that if we thought they would not be embarrassed by hearing it, we would all be telling them about how proud we are of them and how much we believe in them and their future. But again maybe we don't have to tell them; maybe they know. Maybe they can tell just by seeing the love in our eyes today.”

“Maybe there was a magic stronger than spells. Maybe the soulmate principle was responsible, and if two people were meant to be together, nothing could keep them apart.”

“We’re always a victim of our fears, if we can convey them and have people understand them, maybe we can help them protect themselves from their fears.”

“We act out our encounter with the unknown world. We act it out in a way that is analogous to the manner that's presented as a description of what it is that God does at the beginning of time to extract habitable order out of chaos. So you act it out first. Then the second thing is, you watch people who act it out, and you start to make representations of that. That's stories, right? And maybe you admire them. And then maybe after a long time you collect a bunch of those stories, and you can say what that is. You can articulate it as a pattern.”

“But then again, maybe bad things happen because it’s the only way we can keep remembering what good is supposed to look like.”

“We differ, blind and seeing, one from another, not in our senses, but in the use we make of them, in the imagination and courage with which we seek wisdom beyond the senses.”

“In the twentieth century, one encounters artworks that seek to cancel the difference between a real and an imagined reality by presenting themselves in ways that make them indistinguishable from real objects. Should we take this trend as an internal reaction of art against itself?”

“"What's common across all human experience across all time? That's what Jung essentially meant by an archetype. We tend to think that what we see with our senses is real. And of course that's true, but what we see with our senses is what's real that works in the time frame that we exist in. So we see things that we can touch and pick up - we see tools, essentially, that are useful for our moment to moment activities. We don't see the structures of eternity, and we especially don't see the abstract structures of eternity. We have to imagine those with our imagination. Well that's partly what those stories are doing. They're saying that there are forms of stability that transcend our capacity to observe, which is hardly surprising. We know that if we are scientists, because we are always abstracting out things that we can't immediately observe. But there are moral, or metaphysical, or phenomenological realities that have the same nature. You can't see them in your life by observing them with your senses, but you can imagine them with your imagination, and sometimes the things that you imagine with your imagination are more real than the things that you see. Numbers are like that, for example. There are endless things like that. Same with fiction. A good work of fiction is more real than the stories from which it was derived. Otherwise it has no staying power. It's distilled reality. And some would say "it never happened," but it depends on what you mean by "happened." If it's a pattern that repeats in many many places, with variation, you can abstract out the central pattern. So the pattern never purely existed in any specific form, but the fact that you pulled a pattern out from all those exemplars means that you've extracted something real. I think the reason that the story of Adam and Eve has been immune to being forgotten is because it says things about the nature of the human condition that are always true."”

“Maybe the only thing I can definitely say about is this: That’s life. Maybe the only thing we can do is accept it, without really knowing what’s going on.”