The music is happy; the laughter is happy. Everything feels ecstatic and desperate. Blurrily, I think of sex, and I think of death. I realize: Every moment of joyous celebration contains the seed of death.

For the first time in his life he understood why the Bible called sex “knowing”. Everything was different. Now he knew Dante. He’d known Dante. And wonder of wonders, Dante had known him right back.

Sometimes you go so far in your life,you can’t get backthough you know it’s not really your life.

So I learned two things that night, and the next day, from him: the perfection of a moment, and the fleeting nature of it.

She scowled at him until a light appeared in her intelligent eyes, as if she had had an epiphany. “Are you an illegal alien?

Whenever the sadness got too much, I would hire a rickshaw and go to the Upper Bazaar. Those little rickshaw trips to the market and back, shopping for lipsticks and imitation Gucci bags and wind-chimes...

Well, sometimes love seems easy. Like … it’s easy to love rain … and hawks. And it’s easy to love wild plums … and the moon. But with people, seems like love’s a hard thing...

Whereas life separates meaning from emotion, art unites them. Story is an instrument by which you create such epiphanies at will, the phenomenon known as aesthetic emotion…Life on its own, without art to shape it,...

God’s voice is usually nothing more than a whisper, and you have to listen very carefully to hear it. But other times, in those rarest of moments, the answer is obvious and rings as loud...

I thought guys were complicated. Maybe they are. But maybe they’re easy and it’s really me who’s complicated.

I never made one of my discoveries through the process of rational thinking

Je suis partout où je suis.

One day I realized, I am what I’m looking for. The love I’ve been searching the world for. When I devoutly love myself it’s fulfilling, and it attracts others. They fight to love me twice...

He glanced back at the wall. How like a mirror, too, her face. Impossible; for how many people did you know who reflected your own light to you? People were more often–he searched for a...

This was not of the nature of a Christlike lesson for Owen Meany to learn, as he lay in the manger, that someone you hate can give you a hard-on.

The teacher is a catalyst to convert information from a high energy state (list of facts) to a low energy state (visual concept associated with known concepts).

Stories are full of people who find that, in extreme situations, they’re capable of so much more than they imagined they were. Real life is full of people who find that they’re capable of so...

Now that his children had grown into their lives, their own children too, there was no one who needed more than the idea of him, and he thought maybe that was why he had this...

I used to think how lucky she was to have me, but now I realize that’s backwards. A spirit of gratitude yields patience, love, and forgiveness.

I entered the water as naked as when my mother bore me. When I first touched the cold water I felt a shudder go through me, then the shudder was transformed into a sensation of...

Strange combination, isn’t it–gratitude and resentment? But this is the way I think. Actually, I think everybody thinks that way. Even the children of the humans who died long ago, I think they lived their...

Small things start us in new ways of thinking

Sometimes the dreams that come true are the dreams you never even knew you had.

And like an epiphany just landed on my shoulder, everything feels right. A calming acceptance settles over me, and I know, that even through the twists and uncertainty of time, it’s okay if my heart...

Without the quest, there can be no epiphany.

…that realisation that I was the oddity, the statistical probability, life was predictable.

The more one loves, the heavier the meaning of death becomes, and the deeper the sense of loss.

The magic of the street is the mingling of the errand and the epiphany.

People have moments of consciousness and epiphanies throughout their lives, but then suppress the realization.

Looking into the spirit of others is sometimes like looking into a pond. Though we aim to see what’s deep in the bottom, we are often distracted by our own reflection.

Sometimes I’ll be walking along, thinking, and I’ll kick up some dust and I’ll say, Whoa! That makes sense, and I’ll have just had an epiphany, and then forget all about it because I’ll get...

And what lights the sun? Its own fire. And the sun goes on, day after day, burning and burning. The sun and time. The sun and time and burning. Burning. The river bobbled him along...

All continuous suffering, is self inflicted.

Alright! You sir, you sir, how about a shave?Come and visit your good friend Sweeney.You sir, too sir? Welcome to the grave.I will have vengenance.I will have salvation.Who sir, you sir?No ones in the chair,...

If you think you know what your purpose is, but can never seem to gain satisfaction from it, then it’s probably not the purpose you’re destined for.

Do you ever feel that way?””Lonely?”I search for the words. “Restless. As if you haven’t really met yourself yet. As is you’d passed yourself once in the fog, and your heart leapt – ‘Ah! There...

What I learned in Rwanda was that God is not absent when great evil is unleashed. Whether that evil is man-made or helped along by darker forces, God is right there, saving those who respond...

Now the wren has gone to roost and the sky is turnin’ goldAnd like the sky my soul is also turnin’Turnin’ from the past, at last and all I’ve left behind

Detachment is not the absence of emotion, it is the process of becoming one with the Oneness that is the Universe. To be detached, is to realize that the fullness of all there is, is...

Blessed are those with cracks in their broken heart because that is how the light gets in.

Kaladin screamed, reaching the end of the bridge. Finding a tiny surge of strength somewhere, he raised his spear and threw himself off the end of the wooden platform, launching into the air above the...

Sean looks up at her, and he wants to explain it all to her. Explain what it’s like to be rubbed so raw, to have your emotional threshold exceeded day after day, your psyche beaten...

Whose little boy are you?

structure”, that sense of its twisting depths. I remember stars from one horizon to another, making a night sky so plush it still seems like a dream.It was a time in my life when I...

There are those who are legitimately corrupt, who cannot admit that legitimacy allows them to corrupt legitimacy, and to legitimately corrupt others.

He walked on down the dark, empty street. Suddenly an idea came to him. Immediately, with his whole being, he knew it was true. He had glimpsed a new and improbable explanation for the atomic...

…Helen sipped peppermint schnapps and considered the world made of her design. My religion is keeping peace, she thought. It hadn’t begun that way, was nothing she’d planned, but now she saw that’s how it...

In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it’s impossible to really understand somebody, what they...

As I turned to leave, I looked down. Beside my foot, a sprout of greenery was clawing its way through the pristine nothingness to begin anew. It was later that I realized my haven had...

These are maybe the most exciting stars, those just above where sky meets land and ocean, because we so seldom see them, blocked as they usually are by atmosphere…and, as I grow more and more...