“Despite its compassionate tone, From a Mountain In Tibet doesn't promise relief via the page… That this registers as a lack – that simply observing a Buddhist life, rather than efficiently extracting the wisdom from it, feels like a failure – is an un-Buddhist reader response.”
“The weight of life’s ephemerality – the feeling that its glories are always slipping away without you ever quite holding them in two hands – is what pushes a lot of people toward Buddhism. One Blade of Grass evokes this disquietude with tender force.”
“One should expect only the very shallowest sort of revelation from the literary pilgrimage. Whatever remains, whatever is real, survives purely as that dense and ethereal thing: language.”
“Cari Mora is interesting for being a sort of repentance: Having served Starling to a man dripping in Satan imagery, Harris now wishes he could snatch her, and the silence of her lambs, back from between his elegant jaws.”
“The raw teachings of the physical; an unabashed love of irrational play; the echoes of the innocent pathos of youth; small moments of transcending our material prison. This was Camus’s beautiful game.”
“Horror – like the theology that provided its former home – is animated by the full spectrum of human psychology. It is driven by our desire to stop all the clocks, shrink into a bubble of the familiar and the known, reject all things foreign. Equally, it is shot through with the bone-deep knowledge that if we can’t adapt, we will perish.”
"I have come to understand David Foster Wallace's Oblivion for what it really is: A work of horror fiction, whose unique brand of horror is rooted in Wallace’s reading about the brain."
"Does the current state of neuroscientific research create a pessimistic picture of human existence; and if so, how should we react? Can an individual consciousness know itself, and to what degree? And can an individual consciousness contact and know other consciousnesses, and to what degree?"
"Buddhism can be seen to cordon off and denigrate, in pursuit of psychic equilibrium, precisely those inner voices, those inner narratives, which are the wellspring for what Westerners generally regard as worthy of praise in the arts."
"Accusations of scientism and reductionism may or may not be warranted, but the fact remains: the most fundamental discovery in all of biological science remains more-or-less completely un-talked about in English seminars."