"“There is no guarantee of happiness, wisdom, or long life if you drink of me this evening,” she says, very softly. There is no nirvana. There is no salvation. There is no afterlife. There is no rebirth. There is only immense knowledge—of the heart as well as the mind—and the potential for great discoveries, great adventures, and and a guarantee of more of the pain and terror that make up so much of our short lives."

“Human philosophy tends to shake down into values which might be categorizes as intellectual, religious, moral, and aesthetic.”

“Religion and ethics were not always—or even frequently—mutually compatible. The demands of religious absolutism or fundamentalism or rampaging relativism often reflected the worst aspects of contemporary culture or prejudices rather than a system which both man and God could live under with a sense of real justice.”

“I realized that for this moment, nothing in the past mattered. Nothing terrible in the future mattered. What mattered was her skin against me, her hand holding me, the perfume of her hair and skin and the warmth of her breath against my chest. This was satori. This was truth.”

“Have you considered that these prophecies were not divine revelations, but merely manipulation from some secular power?”

“Christ may have lost his faith for a few seconds; He did not sell it in the marketplace for the trinkets of ego and curiosity.”

““I am of no faith,” said Aenea. “If one defines faith as belief in the supernatural.”