Bolivian women sewed their lips shut for days. They threaded needles through their skin to stop their speech, to show what good speaking had done them.

No trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds. Out of wounds and across boundaries.

The pain is what you make of it. You have to find something in it that yields. I understood my guiding imperative as: keep bleeding, but find some love in the blood.

Commonality doesn't inoculate against hurt.

Imagining someone else's pain with too much surety can be as damaging as failing to imagine it.

I needed people to deliver my feelings back to me in a form that was legible. Which is a superlative kind of empathy to seek, or to supply: an empathy that rearticulates more clearly what it's shown.

Pain without cause is a pain we can't trust. We assume it's been chosen or fabricated.

We want our wounds to speak for themselves, but usually we end up having to speak for them.

Freedom from one man is just another one.

Bad movies and bad writing and easy cliches still manage to make us feel things toward each other. Part of me is disgusted by this. Part of me celebrates it.

Irony is easier than hopeless silence but braver than flight.

Me comes before we. You need to become future strong before you can help others do the same.

Eternal love’ (sanatan sneha) is indeed moksha [ultimate liberation].

I just thank God for all of the blessings.

Neither the Army nor the Navy is of any protection, or very little protection, against aerial raids.

The tongue offends and the ears get the cuffing

I really like triples. You hardly ever see me stop at second. My goal is third and that's where I'm headed.

As more information becomes available, and the magnitude of the storm's impact becomes even more apparent, it becomes clear that this recovery will be lengthy.

I feel fairly certain that my hatred harms me more than the people whom I hate.

The fable says that the tortoise won in the end, which is consoling, but the hare shows a good deal of speed and few signs of tiring.

There is an inflow of vital power, which is received by all living organisms during sleep ..... this vital energy is the only power by which the body may be healed, repaired, renewed or maintained