So sadness is a place?' Giovanni asked. 'Sometimes people live there for years,'I said.

If life gives you lemons, don't settle for simply making lemonade - make a glorious scene at a lemonade stand.

This is what rituals are for. We do spiritual ceremonies as human beings in order to create a safe resting place for our most complicated feelings of joy or trauma, so that we don't have to haul those feelings around with us forever, weighing us down.

to travel is worth any cost or sacrifice.

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.

the beauty of doing nothing

This is what intimacy does to us over time. That's what a long marriage can do: It causes us to inherit and trade each other's stories. (p.237)