I always read poetry before I write, to sensitize me to the rhythms and music of language.

She would be half a planet away, floating in a turquoise sea, dancing by moonlight to flamenco guitar.

The phoenix must burn to emerge.

I know it feels like you have all these options and when you make a decision, you lose a world of possibilities. But the reality is, until you make a decision, you have nothing at all.

Remember it all, every insult, every tear. Tattoo it on the inside of your mind. In life, knowledge of poisons is essential. I've told you, nobody becomes an artist unless they have to.

Their love as a dragonfly, skimming over echo park, stoppin to visit the lotus. Eating dreams and drinking blue sky.

How right that the body changed over time, becoming a gallery of scars, a canvas of experience, a testament to life and one's capacity to endure it.

It's such a liability to love another person.

Find someone who will tremble for your touch, someone whose fingers are a poem.

Memory is the fourth dimension to any landscape.

Beauty was empty as a gourd, vain as a parakeet. But it had power. It smelled of musk and oranges and made you close your eyes in a prayer.

The focusing of attention on the breath is perhaps the most universal of the many hundreds of meditation subjects used worldwide.

Difficulties are just things to overcome after all.

The future is female, so women are invited, as they do, to take responsability in the world of politics, in the economics, in art

The question for each man to settle is not what he would do if he had the means, time, influence and educational advantages, but what he will do with the things he has.

My style is colloquial storytelling. It's the way we tell stories to one another - it's not writerly, it's not overdone.

After debauches and orgies there always follows the moral hangover.

What you have inherited from your fathers, earn over again for yourselves, or it will not be yours.

In the marriage union, the independence of the husband and wife will be equal, their dependence mutual, and their obligations reciprocal.

An act of goodness is of itself an act of happiness. No reward coming after the event can compare with the sweet reward that went with it.

Kids are super-independent. This is the time when you don't need your parents for a story anymore. You have a great degree of agency and independence.