A memoir provides a record not so much of the memoirist as of the memoirist's world.

We lead our lives like water flowing down a hill, going more or less in one direction until we splash into something that forces us to find a new course.

After all, when a stone is dropped into a pond, the water continues quivering even after the stone has sunk to the bottom.

If you aren't the woman I think you are, then this isn't the world I thought it was.

The heart dies a slow death, shedding each hope like leaves until one day there are none. No hopes. Nothing remains.

I stumbled out into the courtyard to try to flee my misery, but of course we can never flee the misery that is within us.

When we fight upstream against a rocky undercurrent, every foothold takes on a kind of urgency.

Can't you see? Every step I have taken, since I was that child on the bridge, has been to bring myself closer to you.

And then I became aware of all the magnificent silk wrapped around my body, and had the feeling I might drown in beauty. At that moment, beauty itself struck me as a kind of painful melancholy.

At the temple there is a poem called "Loss" carved into the stone. It has three words, but the poet has scratched them out. You cannot read loss, only feel it.

Sometimes we get through adversity only by imagining what the world might be like if our dreams should ever come true.

Our way is upward, from the species across to the super-species. But the degenerate mind which says ‘All for me’ is a horror to us.

Violence only begets violence when we allow it to. We always have a choice.

If you lay down and act like a doormat... then you are sure to get walked on.

I wanted nothing less than to be a fiction writer when I was a kid. If you had told me I would be an artist or novelist when I grew up, I would have laughed in your face

In life, the worst disasters come from passion.

An important part of what the state does is preserving its history.

If world peace is to be established, peace in the individual must be established first. Transcendental Meditation directly brings peace in the individual life.

Meditation is the best means of elongating life

If the heart is hardened, the intellect is darkened.