Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.

What if the world is holding its breath - waiting for you to take the place that only you can fill?

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet confinement of your aloneness to learn anything or anyone that does not bring you alive is too small for you.

The antidote to exhaustion isn't rest. It's wholeheartedness.

Gratitude arises from paying attention, from being awake in the presence of everything that lives within and without us.

To have a firm persuasion in our work - to feel that what we do is right for ourselves and good for the world at exactly the same time - is one of the great triumphs of human existence.

Sometimes everything has to be inscribed across the heavens so you can find the one line already written inside you.

Our work is to make ourselves visible in the world. This is the soul's individual journey, and the soul would much rather fail at its own life than succeed at someone else's.

Enough. These few words are enough If not these few words, this breath If not this breath, this sitting here This opening to the life we have refused again and again Until now Until now.

I want to know if you know how to melt into that fierce heat of living falling toward the center of your longing.

The courageous conversation is the one you don't want to have.

In a typical history book, black Americans are mentioned in the context of slavery or civil rights. There's so much more to the story.

Curious things, habits. People themselves never knew they had them. [Witness for the Prosecution, also published in The Hound of Death and Other Stories.]

The devils enter uninvited when the house stands empty. For other kinds of guests, you have to first open the door.

Observe the silence between your thoughts, actions, reactions, and you will feel the presence of spirit in the stillness of those spaces.

To know nothing about yourself is to live. To know yourself badly is to think.

I do not have a 24-year-old girlfriend. I have another life altogether.

Yes, Hackney has got more expensive, but so has rest of London

Anytime you run a gimmick offence, you're a little bit afraid - you're not sound in what you're doing in your base stuff.

When the reader and one narrator know something the other narrator does not, the opportunities for suspense and plot development and the shifting of reader sympathies get really interesting.

You will be paid in direct proportion to the value you create in the marketplace.