If you teach three university courses a day, you need something to turn your mind off.

There's some sort of exchange that goes on between human beings that is one of the highest things we do.

[Rumi] is trying to get us to feel the vastness of our true identity... like the sense you might get walking into a cathedral.

The religions of the world are luminous in their individuality, and they have valuable social and soulmaking functions. Surely someday we will quit killing each other over their different strategies.

I think my life is tremendously interesting, and surely, other people do too.

It's such a foolish thing to argue about names, when what we're doing is all one thing.

What I deeply want... is for Rumi to become vitally present for readers, part of what John Keats called our soul-making, that process that is both collective and uniquely individual, that happens outside time and space and inside, that is the ocean we all inhabit and each singular droplet-self.

If you think there's an important difference between being a Christian or a Jew or a Hindu or a Muslim or a Buddhist, then you're making a division between your heart, what you love with, and the way you act in the world.

It's a beautiful lucid dream that has language that I can fiddle with.

Longing becomes more poignant if in the distance you can't tell whether your friend is going away or coming back. The pushing away pulls you in.