There's an ecstatic side to writing. It's like jazz. It just has a life.

I think I'm led by spirit. I think I'm led by a sense of what is right and what feels good to me - what I accept, what is joyful, what is positive. I see my mission, in a way, as carrying that forward - not so much by preaching, but by embodiment.

You can just keep going and going and going, and you never get to the end of it because there is no end. The ending is a beginning. If you feel like that, then you accept that wherever you have to stop on this journey, you continue in some other form somewhere else.

When the ax came into the forest the trees said the handle is one of us.

The Olinka girls do not believe girls should be educated. When I asked a mother why she thought this, she said: A girl is nothing to herself; only to her husband can she become something. What can she become? I asked. Why, she said, the mother of his children. But I am not the mother of anybody's children, I said, and I am something.

You die - and this is why manmade religions don't work for so many of us. The notion that you're dead and that's the end, and they even try to contain you in coffins. They make them out of steel and stuff. But really, your journey - for all you know - is just beginning. For all I know, what you see now is just a tiny little seed. So, I may blossom into an entire - I don't know - something in the sky. Who knows where we're going?

... my mother adorned with flowers whatever shabby house we were forced to live in.