Depression is anger slowed down; panic is grief speeded up.

It's important to attend funerals. It is important to view the body, they say, and to see it committed to earth or fire because unless you do that, the loved one dies for you again and again.

Hope is a gift. You can't choose to have it. To believe and yet to have no hope is to thirst beside a fountain.

Piece by piece living is hard to do. It may even feel like the hardest thing. But it has this going for it: you never need to know what it is you're carrying on your shoulders.

Memory plays tricks. Memory is another word for story, and nothing is more unreliable.

Writing is a hellish task, best snuck up on, whacked on the head, robbed and left for dead.

Lies like that are not a sin, they are a sacrifice.

They are so young, they forget that the world is not as in love with them as they are.

Do you think there's such a thing as a ghost who masquerades as a person? Do you believe that there are people whose bodies are still alive here on earth but whose souls are already in hell?

The world should not be organized to require heroines, and when one is required but fails to appear, we should not judge.

The thief you must fear the most is not the one who steals mere things.

The guy had literally been through hell and back. Even when he wasn’t trying, he made the toilets explode. What would Percy be like if he wanted to act scary?

When you compare yourself against someone else, you always lose.

Happiness of any given life is to be measured, not by its joys and pleasures, but by the extent to which it has been free from suffering-from positive evil.

My retirement plan was in place but Bernie Maidoff with my money.

In Buddhism we don't really believe in sin and salvation as Westerners would define them. We believe in the limitless possibilities of the present and of future moments.

When children stand quiet, they have done some ill.

Some of these days, Oh, you'll miss me honey

The one who acts is always without conscience; nobody has a conscience but the contemplative person.

I'm always interested in encountering people who are synesthetic and seeing how they experience things.

In your own bosom you bear your heaven and earth, And all you behold, though it appears without, It is within, in your imagination, Of which this world of mortality is but a shadow.