The world is always going to be dangerous, and people get badly banged up, but how can there be more meaning than helping one another stand up in a wind and stay warm?

They always threw their arms around and hugged me while crying our Yiddish endearments. Yet none of them believed in God. They believed in social justice, good works, Israel, and Bette Midler. I was nearly thirty before I met a religious Jew.

... the reason life works at all is that not everyone in your tribe is nuts on the same day. [pp. 65-66]

She felt as if the mosaic she had been assembling out of life's little shards got dumped to the ground, and there was no way to put it back together.

Everything was coming together by coming apart . . . It is the most difficult Zen practice to leave people to their destiny, even though it's painful - just loving them, and breathing with them, and distracting them in a sweet way, and laughing with them . . . if something was not my problem, I probably did not have the solution.

Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. It's like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can't stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship

Because this business of becoming conscious, of being a writer, is ultimately about asking yourself, How alive am I willing to be?