Eternally, woman spills herself away in driblets to the thirsty, seldom being allowed the time, the quiet, the peace, to let the pitcher fill up to the brim.

We insist on permanency, on continuity, when the only continuity possible is in growth, in freedom, in the sense that the dancers are free, barely touching as they pass but partners in the same pattern. The only real security in a relationship lies neither in looking back in nostalgia, nor forward with dread or anticipation, but living in the present and accepting the relationship as it is now.

Go with the pain, let it take you. Open your palms and your body to the pain. It comes in waves like the tide and you must be open as a vessel lying on the beach, letting it fill you up and then, retreating, leaving you empty and clear.

To give without any reward, or any notice, has a special quality of its own.

Not knowing how to feed the spirit, we try to muffle its demands in distraction...What matters is that one be for a time inwardly attentive.

I had the feeling . . . that my experience was very different from other people’s. (Are we all under this illusion?)

Fame is a kind of death because it arrests life around the person in the public eye. If one is recognized everywhere, one begins to feel like Medusa. People stop their normal life and actions and freeze into staring manikins. "We can never catch people or life unawares," as I wrote to my mother, in an outburst of frustration. "It is always looking at us."