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

There is a level of grief so deep that it stops resembling grief at all. The pain becomes so severe that the body can no longer feel it. The grief cauterizes itself, scars over, prevents inflated feeling. Such numbness is a kind of mercy.

There's a lot of disorder that comes along with wanting to know everything and wanting to try everything and wanting to experience everything, but there's a lot of knowledge that comes out of it too.

Venice is beautiful, but like a Bergman movie is beautiful; you can admire it, but you don't really want to live in it.

Yoga is the effort to experience one's divinity personally and then to hold on to that experience forever.

Now imagine a life in which every day a person is presented with not two or even three but dozens of choices, and you can begin to grasp why the modern world has become, even with all its advantages, a neurosis-generating machine of the highest order.

In the end, though, maybe we must all give up trying to pay back the people in this world who sustain our lives. In the end, maybe it's wiser to surrender before the miraculous scope of human generosity and to just keep saying thank you, forever and sincerely, for as long as we have voices.