Asceticism is the denial of the will to live; and the transition from the Old Testament to the New, from the dominion of Law to that of Faith, from justification by works to redemption through the Mediator, from the domain of sin and death to eternal life in Christ, means, when taken in its real sense, the transition from the merely moral virtues to the denial of the will to live.

There are only new ways of making them felt —of examining what those ideas feel like being lived on Sunday morning at 7 A.M., after brunch, during wild love, making war, giving birth, mourning our dead —while we suffer the old longings, battle the old warnings and fears of being silent and impotent and alone, while we taste new possibilities and strengths.

There was a pain in Muriel to become herself that engaged my heart. I knew what it was like to be haunted by the ghost of a self one wished to be, but only half-sensed. Sometimes her words both thrilled me and made me weep.

The subject of revolution is ourselves, is our lives.

Begin now to be what you will be hereafter.

Maybe he'll be different from who he was and always is.

Live out of your imagination, not your history.

A tendency that's run through your family for generations can stop with you. You're a transition person — a link between past and future. And your own change can affect many, many lives downstream.

I must change in order to change the world. The only revolution with any permanent value takes part in the breast of the individual person.

Revolutions usually begin as replacements for older certainties, and not as pristine discoveries in uncharted terrain.

This new consensus seemed so compelling that Ernst Mayr, the dean of modern Darwinians, opened the ashcan of history for a deposit of Geoffrey's ideas about anatomical unity.

...The most important thing, I think. You can't run from your past. You have to take it for what it is and realize that it's part of you.