The most precious gift you can bring to your lover is your suffering.

We have a saying in Marseilles: a man in no hurry gets nowhere fast. I have been in no hurry for eight years.

Cowardece is often just another name for being taken by surprise.

For all his wisdom, he did not know that love cannot be tested. Honesty can be tested and loyalty. But there is not test for love. Love goes on forever, once it begins, even if we come to hate the one we love. Love goes on forever because love is born in the part of us that does not die.

The truth is a bully we all pretend to like

The burden of happiness can only be relieved by the balm of suffering.

There's a truth deeper than experience. It's beyond what we see, or even what we feel. It's an order of truth that separates the profound from the merely clever, and the reality from the perception. We're helpless, usually, in the face of it; and the cost of knowing it, like the cost of knowing love, is sometimes greater than any heart would willingly pay. It doesn't always help us to love the world, but it does prevent us from hating the world. And the only way to know that truth is to share it, from heart to heart, just as Prabhakar told it to me, just as I'm telling it to you now.