Hell is everything. Heaven is nothing.

How to unravel the knot of reality? Slowly and patiently. You cannot run away from it. You cannot run towards it. Yet truth runs in your footsteps. It is the face in the mirror, the light of the sun, the winter rainstorms, the heat of summer in the city

The attainment of enlightenment makes you happy forever. It frees you from the mental and emotional pains that human beings experience every day. You live in a condition of ecstasy, brightness and joy all of the time.

The way you succeed at all this stuff is by stopping trying to succeed and just working very hard without thinking about it, just trusting, completely. It's that faith that creates the bridge on which you walk across to eternity.

The women that I met were exceptional, extraordinary - tremendous purity, tremendous gentleness, self-giving and power.

In poetry, and in my study in graduate school, I was drawn to a particular poet, Theodore Roethke. I did a dissertation on "The Evolution of Matter and Spirit in the Poetry of Theodore Roethke" for my Ph.D.

Maybe you don't need to do this. Maybe this isn't your moment. But if you do feel the pull of the eternal, then you can't stay away from it.