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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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