Devotion is diligence without assurance. Faith is a way of saying "Yes, I pre-accept the terms of the universe and I embrace in advance what I am presently incapable of understanding.

You have to work ceaselessly on your end to digest and imbibe your opportunities or, I have come to believe, they will gradually slip away and knock on someone else's more receptive door.

I never promised the universe that I would write brilliantly; I only promised the universe that I would write.

Traveling-to-a-place energy and living-in-a-place energy are two fundamentally different energies

I wanted to experience both. I wanted worldly enjoyment and divine transcendence. I wanted what the Greeks called kalos kai agathos, the singular balance of the good and the beautiful. I'd been missing both during these last hard years, because both pleasure and devotion require a stress-free space in which to flourish and I'd been living in a giant trash compactor of nonstop anxiety. As for how to balance the urge for pleasure against the longing for devotion...well, surely there was a way to learn that trick.

Look - I understand that an unexamined life is not worth living, but do you think I could someday have an unexamined lunch?

I've ruined my eyes, I've ruined my health from my studiousness!