Whatever happens when we die, it would be really weird if it was what we had expected. Even if you were a lifelong Christian believer, it would be kind of weird if there actually were pearly gates.

One of the ways that we cope with anxiety is by over planning and over controlling. If we know where it's going to, we can just relax and do it. Unfortunately, in my experience, that's not the way it works. The story doesn't want to be told what to do. You have to enter into this process with a high level of trust that the many hours of choosing that you're doing every day will gradually clarify the narrative for you. And that's what happens.

It was that impossible thing: happiness that does not wilt to reveal the thin shoots of some new desire rising from within it.

If you haven't read you don't have the voice. The lack of voice eliminates experience.

The artist’s job, I think, is to be a conduit for mystery.

In Catholicism, we would say you're going to be judged, so therefore you should do better now. For me, Buddhism is somewhat more workable because instead of saying I have to do good, it says I have to notice what I'm actually doing.

Reading is a form of prayer, a guided meditation that briefly makes us believe we're someone else, disrupting the delusion that we're permanent and at the center of the universe. Suddenly (we're saved!) other people are real again, and we're fond of them.