Here in America, marriage still has a mystical, intangible power: It is a passport to adulthood and respectability and to a certain extent citizenship. Any relationship less than “married” is considered temporary and not worthy of honor.
I want to have a lasting experience of God.
Marriage is not simply a romantic union between two people; it’s also a political and economic contract of the highest order.
Thich Nhat Hanh has the ability to bring forth the state of peace that we each inherently posses merely by his presence in a room-this is divine power.
If you’re alive, you’re a creative person.
I think of modern marriage as a car strangely fashioned out of an old abandoned horse carriage, built upon the framework of a mule cart. All the original engineering is still there, underneath it all.
Do you think there’s any way humans can love each other without complication?
For if there is one thing I have learned over the years about men, it is that feelings of powerlessness do not usually bring forth their finest qualities.
I had long ago learned that when you are the giant, alien visitor to a remote and foreign culture it is sort of your job to become an object of ridicule. It’s the least you can do, really, as a polite guest.
Every word was a singing sparrow, a magic trick, a truffle for me. The words made me laugh in delight.
When you have only two minutes to say good-bye to the person you love most in the world, and you don’t know when you’ll see each other again, you can become logjammed with the effort to say and do and settle everything at once.
Nobody’s life is interesting enough to warrant a third memoir.
What time has ever been a simple time for those who are living it?
By unnerving definition, anything that the heart has chosen for its own mysterious reasons it can always unchoose later – again, for its own mysterious reasons.
If you want to know the world, sometimes you have to get out and roll around.
How could two people who were so in love not end up happily ever after? It had to work. Didn’t it?
I never wanted to be the person that waited for a stranger to come to town – I wanted to be the stranger!
The act of quiet nighttime talking, illustrates for me more than anything else the curious alchemy of companionship.
The world needs women who stop asking for permission from the principal. Permission to live their lives as they deeply know they often should. I think we still look to authority figures for validation, recognition, permission.
If I’d had any way of knowing that things were- as Lily Tomlin once said- going to get a whole lot worse before they got worse, I’m not sure how I would have slept that night.