Cherish your solitude. Take trains by yourself to places you have never been. Sleep out alone under the stars.

Then there was sex, which, for me, was such a need. When I was younger, I had a need to have sex with everyone. I don't know where that was coming from, but there was such a need to connect physically - obviously, for me to connect physically to myself. There were times, like I say in the book, where you lay on top of me, when you push me down, when you're inside me.

I really believe that is helping people. I've been talking to oncologists about how we can re-frame and re-think the chemo process, so it becomes a much more spiritual, psychological journey. Where people really could burn away what needs to be burned away. It's happening anyway. Why not frame it in a psychological way where it can serve as a transformation?

What I would argue is that real spirituality is the ability to keep encountering two opposite thoughts at the same time and still maintain some kind of morality and perspective in the world. It is not the elimination of one side of the equation or the elimination of what you don't like; it is the investigation of everything.

I want to read so I can read the Koran read the signs in the street know the number of the bus I'm supposed to take when I one day leave this house.

To love women, to love our vaginas, to know them and touch them and be familiar with who we are and what we need. To satisfy ourselves, to teach our lovers to satisfy us, to be present in our vaginas, to speak of them out loud, to speak of their hunger and pain and loneliness and humor, to make them visible so they cannot be ravaged in the dark without great consequence, so that our center, our point, our motor, our dream, is no longer detached, mutilated, numb, broken, invisible, or ashamed.

Dance has a transformative effect on bodily trauma.