So often loneliness comes from being out of touch with parts of oneself. We go searching for those parts in other people, but there’s a difference between feeling separate from others and separate from oneself.
In the absence of touching and being touched, people of all ages can sicken and grow touched starved. Touch seems to be as essential as sunlight.
Writer’s block is a luxury most people with deadlines don’t have.
I’m fascinated how often and with what whole-heartedness people will risk their lives to perform acts of courage, sacrifice, and compassion for total strangers.
The knowing, I told myself, is only a vapor of the mind, and yet it can wreck havok with one’s sanity.
Horses have made civilization possible.
We live on the leash of our senses.
Smell is the mute sense, the one without words.
Our skin is what stands between us and the world.
An animal on a leash is not tamed by the owner. The owner is extending himself through the leash to that part of his personality which is pure dog, that part of him which just wants to eat, sleep, bark, hump chairs, wet the floor in joy, and drink out of a toilet bowl.
It’s essential to tailor rehab to what impassions someone. The brain gradually learns by riveting its attention-through endless repetitions.
We tend to think of heroes only in terms of violent combat, whether it’s against enemies or a natural disaster. But human beings also perform radical acts of compassion; we just don’t talk about them, or we don’t talk about them as much.
There is that unique moment when one confronts something new and astonishment begins.
I try to give myself passionately, totally, to whatever I’m observing, with as much affectionate curiosity as I can muster, as a means of understanding a little better what being human is.
We have vexed and bothered every plant and every animal on every continent.
The great affair, the love affair with life, is to live as variously as possible, to groom one’s curiosity like a high-spirited thoroughbred, climb aboard, and gallop over the thick, sunstruck hills every day.
Happiness doesn’t require laughter, only well-being and a sense that the world is breaking someone else’s heart, not mine.
Love is the most important thing in our lives, a passion for which we would fight or die, and yet we’re reluctant to linger over its names. Without a supple vocabulary, we can’t even talk or think about it directly.
A self is a frightening thing to waste, it’s the lens through which one’s whole life is viewed, and few people are willing to part with it, in death, or even imaginatively, in art.
Love is the white light of emotion.