"A delicate balance is required: keep the penitent tautly close to the point of recognizing sin, and then allow the relief of that pressure to flow through forgiveness. Confession increases this tautness, only to clear the path for release."

"Word of advice, sister mine. If you want to keep your papers private, don't write 'Private' on the cover. It set the mater right off. It was all I could do to stop her sniffing around like some great sniffing thing."

"You can never know everything. Part of what you know is always wrong. Perhaps the most important part. A portion of wisdom lies in knowing that. A portion of knowledge lies in going on anyway."

"When you look at Van Gogh, Jesus, Buddha, Mother Teresa from a 'fiscal' perspective, they were homeless. When you look at them from a humanityperspective, they were priceless."

"A God out there and values out there, if they existed, would be utterly useless and unintelligible to us. There is nothing to be gained by nostalgia for the old objectivism, which was in any case used only to justify arrogance, tyranny, and cruelty. People [forget] ... How utterly hateful the old pre-humanitarianism world was."

"Vietnam was a palpable failure. And of course, in retrospect, it was even more clearly a disaster and a failure than maybe people understood at the time."

"I write woman: woman must write woman. And man, man. So only anoblique consideration will be found here of man; it’s up to him to saywhere his masculinity and femininity are at: this will concern us oncemen have opened their eyes and seen themselves clearly."

"A few years ago, the city council of Monza, Italy, barred pet owners from keeping goldfish in curved bowls... Saying that it is cruel to keep a fish in a bowl with curved sides because, gazing out, the fish would have a distorted view of reality. But how do we know we have the true, undistorted picture of reality?"

"An element of wisdom is knowing that life experiences are blood brothers with climate change, whether you have the resources to detect weather changes, it can still surprise you anytime."

"A commune of library employees in Moscow created an 'extreme' commune in which all clothing - including undergarments - was collectivized. According to Mehnert, if a communard preferred to wear his or her own underclothes 'it would be characterized as a backslide into darkest capitalism; as prejudice originating in a petit-bourgeois ideology'."