You can butcher the sheep only once. But if you are careful, you can shear the sheep every year.

I had a great teacher in India who said to me, 'If you think you're spiritual and evolved and enlightened, go home for Christmas.'

Virginia Woolf wrote, "Across the broad continent of a woman's life falls the shadow of a sword." On one side of that sword, she said, there lies convention and tradition and order, where all is correct. But on the other side of that sword, if you're crazy enough to cross it and choose a life that does not follow convention, "all is confusion." Nothing follows a regular course. Her argument was that the crossing of the shadow of that sword may bring a more interesting existence to a woman, but you can bet it will be more perilous.

Devotion is diligence without assurance

every healthy marriage is composed of walls and windows. The windows are the aspects of your relationship that are open to the world—that is, the necessary gaps through which you interact with family and friends; the walls are the barriers of trust behind which you guard the most intimatesecrets of your marriage.

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

I said, "It seems like you have fond feelings toward your ex-wife. Are you two still close?" "Nah," he said casually. "She thinks I changed my name to Motherfucker."