I'm not a big Austen reader. I wouldn't say I dislike her, but if I had to choose between her and Eliot to bring to a desert island, it would definitely be Eliot.

Most of us, even if only for two minutes in our lives, have experienced at some time or another an inexplicable and random sense of complete bliss, unrelated to anything that was happening in the outside world.

That’s the thing about a human life-there’s no control group, no way to ever know how any of us would have turned out if any variables had been changed.

The only thing more unthinkable than leaving was staying; the only thing more impossible than staying was leaving.

Beauty is not required. Beauty is accuracy's distraction.

The Yogic sages say that all the pain of a human life is caused by words, as is all the joy. We create words to define our experience and those words bring attendant emotions that jerk us around like dogs on a leash. We get seduced by our own mantras (I'm a failure I'm lonely I'm a failure I'm lonely) and we become monuments to them. To stop talking for a while, then, is to attempt to strip away the power of words, to stop choking ourselves with words, to liberate ourselves from our suffocating mantras.

Given that life is so short, do I really want to spend one-ninetieth of my remaining days on earth reading Edward Gibbon?