Sun House by David James Duncan, r. Oct. 2023

p. 30 Risa never connected this tribe to her own amiability, diplomacy, strategic withdrawals, radiant energy, crazy grin, or anything of the sort. She believed she'd just lucked into an unusually cool circle of friends. But though many people spend energy in search of some sort of calm and stable center, a very few people simply are such centers. Without realizing it, Risa had become one of these rare ones, and as a result was encircled by friends in almost every milieu she frequented.

p. 114 Glancing from her poems to his journal, a pleasing thought occurred to Lorilee. She spoke it. "You know, you're a poet yourself, Trey. Your body's your pen. The mountains are your paper. Free-climbing vertical walls, you leave behind the lines your body traveled. And yeah, those lines are invisible once you come down off the wall. But I'll bet they've entered you. I'll bet those lines stay inside your mind and body the way a good mountain song or poem stays in my instruments and me. So who cares if others can't see what you wrote up there? It's in you."

p. 136 Trey looked lost. She tried to coax him. "The reason Snyder says 'The mountains are your mind' is that every mountain's true nature is alive and complete for all eternity, Trey. And so is our true nature. We have always been one with the mountains. But it's not climbing them that makes this so. It's being free of illusions. It's a disappearing of ego...

p. 189 ...which brings me to why I prefer high-mountain backpacking to skiing. In backpacking, the suffering endured as you climb sensitizes you to the gorgeousness when you arrive on high, and your elation lasts and lasts. In skiing, a mechanical lift crammed with party-hardies ratchets you to elevation in minutes, only to turn around and, in seconds, undo all the elevation gain you didn't suffer to achieve, so that way too soon you're DOWN and the only cure for elation deflation is to get back in the party-hardy line, pay the piper, ratchety-ratchet back up, and bouncy-bounce down again, up, down, up, down, wanka wanka wanka.

p. 229 "It also seems you are taught, you priests, to defend your God, but never to blame Him. This is a mistake. When we blame God, two things happen. On, He becomes present. He is now there with the sufferer, taking blame. And two, why not blame God? He's God. He can take all the blame there is! Go ahead! Blame Him! It keeps Him with you!"

p. 280 "Anna often talks of rising acidity in the oceans. But I wonder about our acidity? It's risen too. And how could it not? The rich own everything, including our token democracy, banks, and corporations, we're led by political half-truths and lobbyists, not leaders, and to try to understand our world we watch news-flavored propaganda delivered in meaningless soundbytes. But doesn't our acidity, like the oceans', cause delicate things to die out in us? I feel as if things as fine as coral reefs are vanishing from people. Things like a general kindness. Quiet sensitivity. Sincerity."

p. 308 Risa waited till she was calm enough not to hurl Julian's scathing tone back in his face. "What I experience," she said quietly, "is a feeling of arrogance if I pretend that spiritual giants like the Buddha and Jesus and Krishna don't know more about such matters than I do. Would you contradict Beethoven if he shared secrets about composing symphonies, or diss Martina Navratilova's secrets about crushing top-spin serves, because what they said was beyond your experience? It's common sense to believe it when Buddha, Krishna, and Jesus in the Apocrypha all tell us reincarnation is the way of it. That's not teatime chitchat. My concepts of mind and soul are based on truths that realized beings bequeath humanity to free us from illusion."

p. 340 "You didn't ask for my two cents but here they are: the only way you won't be disappointed with your life is by finding something great to do with it. That's the blessing and curse of being great yourself."

p. 394 On a high peak in the Alps, a climber named Emile Javelle once looked out over the world and was swallowed alive by a vastness that overwhelmed him. Years passed before he could even speak of it. When he did, he said that any philosophy, religion, or science that tells us what the universe is, or what our place and purpose here are, is a blindfold, not a seeing. 'The further the vision of our eye extends,' Javelle said, 'the greater the mystery becomes.'"

p. 456 It will be the task of our generation not to seek great things, but to save and preserve our souls out of the chaos, and to realize that it is the only thing we can carry as a prize from the burning building. –Dietrich Bonhoeffer

p. 469 Here in this body is a dwelling place. Within the dwelling place is a small space. What is there in this space that we should seek to perceive?

p. 495 In all but certain rare kinds of light – blue June dusk; golden day in October; midwinter moonlight amid fresh snowfall – the connecting thread won't even be visible.

p. 512 "I like retired traces like this," Lou said as he ratcheted along. "Keep cows an' vehicles off a track a few years, give it a mow now an' again, an' it takes on a gentleness. We'll reach that school feelin' better'n if we drove up. On foot a fella actually arrives."

p. 583 Unlike humans, fish are not ignorant of each other's intentions.

p. 707 The chronological presumption that we're "progressing into a better future" has not just blinded humans to the fullness of the moment, it's put the very survival of life on Earth in doubt.

p. 716 "'Silence is the tribute we pay to holiness,'" Kale whispered, "'We slip off words when we enter a sacred place just as we slip off shoes.'" [– Pico Iyer]

The Great Unknown by Marcus du Sautoy, r. Apr. 2020

p. 21 "The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is. It's how nature creates itself, on every scale, the snowflake and the snowstorm. It makes me so happy. To be at the beginning again, knowing almost nothing." - Tom Stoppard, Arcadia

p. 56 At least with the future we can wait and see what the outcome of chaotic equations produces. But trying to work backward and understand what state our planet was in to produce the present is equally if not more challenging. The past, even more than the future, is probably something we can never truly know.

p. 75 "Everyone takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world." - Arthur Schopenhauer

p. 172 The problem, [Herbert McCabe] believed, is that religion far too often commits idolatry by trying to engage too personally with this concept of God. The trouble is that an undefined, unknowable, transcendent concept is too abstract for many to engage with. It can't offer the sort of consolation that many seek. So perhaps it is inevitable that God's potency depends on becoming a little less transcendent, and more tangible.

p. 229 "The universe is not constructed for our convenience. It's not an exercise in the philosophy of science. It's too bad if we can't find these things out. In fact, I'd be very suspicious if all these fundamental questions happened to be answerable by what we're doing.

p. 318 Consciousness allows the brain to take part in mental time travel. You can think of yourself in the past and even project yourself into the future. But at the same time, being aware of your own existence means having to confront the inevitability of your demise. Death-awareness is the price we pay for self-awareness. That is why Gallup believes that later in life chimpanzees prefer to lose their ability to be conscious of themselves. Could dementia in humans play a similar role, protecting aging humans from the painful recognition of their impending death?

p. 331 Many neuroscientists now speak of consciousness as being similar to the wetness of water. Consciousness is an emergent phenomenon in the sense that it is a higher-level property of a system triggered by neuronal activity happening at a lower level. But that doesn't really explain what this higher-level thing really is.

p. 333 "What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday and our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow: our life is the creation of our mind." - The Dhammapada

p. 417 I wonder, though, whether, as I come to the end of my exploration, I have changed my mind about declaring myself an atheist. With my definition of a God as that which we cannot know, to declare myself an atheist would mean that I believe there is nothing we cannot know. I don't believe that anymore. In some sense I think I have proved that this God does exist. The challenge now is to explore what quality this God has. My statement about being an atheist is really just a response to the rather impoverished version of God offered by most religions and cultures. I reject the existence of a supernatural intelligence that intervenes in the evolution of the universe and in our lives. This is a rejection of the God that people assign strange properties to - such as compassion, wisdom, love - that make no sense when it comes to the idea that I am exploring.

p. 426 Studies into consciousness suggest boundaries beyond which we cannot go. Our internal worlds are potentially unknowable to others. But isn't that one of the reasons we write and read novels? It is the most effective way to give others access to that internal world.-