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excerpted from
Courage To Pray

Our deep reality may take over in moments when we are so carried away by joy that we forget who might be looking at us, . . . or when we are unselfconscious in moments of extreme pain, moments when we have a deep sense of sadness or of wonder. At these moments we see something of the true person that we are.

The Mysterious Placebo

excerpted from
Anatomy Of An Illness As Perceived By The Patient

Over long centuries, doctors have been educated by their patients to observe the prescription ritual. Most people seem to feel their complaints are not taken seriously unless they are in possession of a little slip of paper with indecipherable but magic markings. To the patient, a prescription is a certificate of assured recovery.

Thanks

Listen / with the night falling we are saying thank you / we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings / we are running out of the glass rooms / with our mouths full of food to look at the sky / and say thank you

excerpted from
Break Of Day

Now that little by little I am beginning to age, and little by little taking on her likeness in the mirror, I wonder whether, if she were to return, she would recognize me for her daughter, in spite of the resemblance of our features. She might if she came back at break of day and found me up and alert in a sleeping world, awake as she used to be, and I often am, before everyone.

excerpted from
Letters To Olga

And slowly but surely, I found myself in a very strange and wonderful state of mind: I imagined I was lying somewhere in the grass beneath a tree, doing nothing, expecting nothing, worrying about nothing, simply letting the intoxication of a hot summer day possess me.

excerpted from
The Doors Of Perception

According to such a theory, each one of us is potentially Mind at Large. But insofar as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive. To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet.

excerpted from
Dombey And Son

“What is money after all?” said Mr. Dombey, backing his chair a little, that he might the better gaze in sheer amazement at the presumptuous atom that propounded such an inquiry.

excerpted from
An Alphabet For Gourmets

P is for peas . . . [and here are] a few reasons why the best peas I ever ate in my life were, in truth, the best peas I ever ate in my life.