Hollow Cost?

     A guest: Jews are said to understand one another by a glance. What they say afterward is nothing but a passionate commentary on this glance.
— Edmund Jabés, The Book of Yukel/Return to the Book, Waldrop (tr.), p. 59.

     "We have little to say about many things. God had so much to say about so little. God fell silent in the Void. Man chatters on in the Fullness. But how will he make himself heard?"
— Edmund Jabés, Ibid., p. 157.

     "I only had eyes for the infinite. I tended to let the days pass by. They punished me."
— Edmund Jabés, Ibid., p. 165.

     "I walk behind the wind, and the stifled scream of words is only a bit of dust under my feet.
     Now the book is done. Three times the lesson of the book. Night is inside it forever.
     I started out wanting to forget, and the void mapped my route. Nothing more certain: you cannot turn green again, away from your roots.
     Dry branches of my felled trees. The forest counts on its excess of sap....
— Edmund Jabés, Ibid., p. 231.

    In every situation, for every person, there is a realm of freedom and a realm of constraint. One may live in either realm. One must recognize the irresistible forces, the iron fist, the stone wall — must know them for what they are in order not to fall into the sea like Icarus — but, knowing them, one may turn away and live in the realm of one's freedom. A farmer must know the fence which bounds his land but need not spend his life standing there, looking out, beating his fists on the rails; better he till his soil, think of what to grow, where to plant the fruit trees. However small the area of freedom, attention and devotion may expand it to occupy the whole of life.
— Allen Wheelis, How People Change, pp. 30-31.

     There are big balloons of blame in every corporation, drifting gently from person to person. The purpose of your memos is to keep these balloons aloft, to bat them gently on their way. This requires soft, meaningless phrases, such as "less than optimal." If you write a direct memo, a memo that uses sharp words such as "bad" to make an actual point, you could burst a balloon and wind up with blame all over your cubicle.
— Dave Barry, Claw Your Way to the Top, p. 47.

....They decided to take a further, daring step. They would try sending a word from their dimension into ours.
     How carefully was that word chosen!
     The word that allows yes, the word that makes no possible.
     The word that puts the free in freedom and takes the obligation out of love.
     The word that throws a window open after the final door is closed.
     The word upon which all adventure, all exhilaration, all meaning, all honor depends.
     The word that fires evolution's motor of mud.
     The word that the cocoon whispers to the caterpillar.
     The word that molecules recite before bonding.
     The word that separates that which is dead from that which is living.
     The word no mirror can turn around.
     In the beginning was the word and the word was

                           CHOICE

— Tom Robbins, Still Life With Woodpecker, p. 190.

     In our society transformation has a bad name, having been associated with various neditation fads and instant success groups. But real transformation has nothing to do with gaining a better life in this world; deliverance does not involve trying to use Buddhist  chanting techniques to acquire a new Mercedes, nor is salvation a side effect of Fundamentalist healing services. Transformation for a Zen monk, a Moslem sufi, a Catholic, or a Jehova's Witness is the same: It is a matter of delivering one's self into the possession of God. Meister Eckhart puts it very well when he says, "We must become as clear glass through which God can shine." But this involves giving up the self," which feels just like dying.
— Whitley Strieber, Communion: A True Story, p. 225.