"We are born into this precious human existence to achieve the uni cation of opposites and become enlightened, or liberated, from the illusion of separation."

"A good book, he had concluded, leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul. Such books were for him rare and, as he aged, rarer. Still he searched, one more Ithaca for which he was forever bound."

"On a cooler sun on a primordial earth: 'I later learned that biologists, when they are feeling jocose, refer to this as the 'Chinese Resaturant Problem'--because we has a dim sun."

"It is a tragicomic fact that our proper upbringing has become an ally of the secret police. (...) The 'Tell the truth!' imperative drummed into us so automatically that we feel ashamed of lying even to a secret policeman."

"I don't know that movies are important. But I know that stories are important. Movies may disappear. They've only been around, for God's sake, for the last hundred years... I think that it's the need to tell stories, and that people need to be told stories. It's the old sitting around the fire, you know."

"Entering a cell, penetrating deep as a flying saucer to find a new galaxy would be an honorable task for a new scientist interested more in the inner state of the soul than in outer space."