Great Throughts Treasury

"Improvising may be the religious ritual and thought of the contemporary world."

"Her writing is lyrical, witty, and shaped by a keen, informed intelligence. Horses whisper to her. Flowers pose for her. Humans love her."

"Inventories from children's hiding places and from religious holy places bear remarkable similarity."

"Reality can be discovered only by reading it. Most of humanity has at some time or another deciphered the texts of animal footprints, the sound of water, the lines in the palms of their hands, the constellations, the arrangement of stones. Whatever we perceive religiously we 'read': that is we interpret ? we find meaning in relation to ourselves. The external is internalized."

"The imaginal reality that gives depth and integrity to our lives."

"The things of this world are vessels, entrances for stories; when we touch them, we fall into their labyrinthine resonances. The world is no longer divided, then, into those inconvenient categories of subject and object, and the world becomes religiously apprehended."

"Through the use of imagination, metaphor, and personal symbol making, we can discover or recognize the sacred within the secular, or the divine in the ordinary."

"We must fabricate, make up our sacred stories as we go along."