Venice seems like a wonderful city in which to die a slow and alcoholic death, or to lose a loved one, or to lose the murder weapon with which the loved one was lost in the first place.
I have established a reputation for being someone who, if you tell her to do one thing, will almost certainly do the other. I also have a temper.
There’s this human capacity for joy and endurance, even when things are at their worst. A joy that occurs not despite our suffering, but within it.
The inability to open up to hope is what blocks trust, and blocked trust is the reason for blighted dreams.
A true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that is holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life.
I’m choosing happiness over suffering, I know I am. I’m making space for the unknown future to fill up my life with yet-to-come surprises.
Being content with what you have already is an art form that leads to a peace that can’t be replaced by anything else.
I’m still aspiring to be a better and better person, but I think that disappointments have made me gentler with other people and their disappointments, the stuff that they have to carry around and endure.
Stop wearing your wishbone where your backbone ought to be.
If you’re going to answer the call and you’re going to transform and you’re going to change, get ready. It is not a day at the beach.
When you want to do something creative and you want to do something new, you have to start with the thing that’s making you want to jump up out of bed in the morning.
There is hardly a more gracious gift that we can offer somebody than to accept them fully, to love them almost despite themselves.
To be fully seen by somebody, then, and be loved anyhow – this is a human offering that can border on miraculous.
Ruin is a gift. Ruin is the road to transformation.
I consider a good dinner party at our house to be where people drink and eat more than they’re meant to.
I would like to spend the rest of my days in a place so silent–and working at a pace so slow–that I would be able to hear myself living.
Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions.
That’s the thing about a human life-there’s no control group, no way to ever know how any of us would have turned out if any variables had been changed.
You might get nothing out of it at all except a beautiful, long life where all you did was follow your gorgeous curiosity. And that should be enough too.
I think that if you can roast a chicken, you can get whatever you want out of a woman.