You can do anything you want to [ in ashram] if you can find the time. It's a very rigorous day. It starts at 2:30 in the morning and often doesn't end until midnight, so if you can actually find a moment to have a drink or a smoke, you're quite welcome to, as long as it doesn't interfere with your capacity to follow the schedule.

From bitter searching of the heart, quickened with passion and with pain we rise to play a greater part this is the faith from which we start.

The cutting of the gem has to be finished before you can see whether it shines.

The troubles came and I saved what I could save. A thread of light, a particle, a wave.

I cannot understand why my arm is not a lilac tree.

What [Prozac] does is completely annihilate the sexual drive, so the question of passion hardly arises.

There are a few things that deal with passion. There's Prozac.