I recognized him then; that is, I finally comprehended what I had known but had never been able to formulate: he had always been complete. He had finished the work of becoming himself, long before any of us could even imagine such a feat was possible.

There's something in psychology called the narrative paradigm, which essentially means that we think of our lives as stories in which we are the main characters.

An unjust world represented as harmonious is a political position.

Rilke said that art can come only out of inner necessity. I write because I must. Or because I cannot not write.

In some way there is no real life. It's always the story of your life that you're living.

I've never meditated for a moment in my life. I don't know how it works. But one of the things you have to do to put yourself in the meditating mode is stop narrating yourself to yourself.

Washington D.C.! Congress is full of self-declared outsiders.