I began to feel that all the people I'd ever known who had died or left me had not in fact gone away, but continued to live on inside me just as this man's wife lived on inside him.

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.

Instead of saying they rose all the way to the top, we should say they learned all the way to the top.

How do you plan a rebirth? I'm not sure you do. You just stand in the darkness until you can't endure it any long, and then you move forward until you're standing in the light.

Perhaps it is only human nature to inflict suffering on anything that will endure suffering, whether by reason of its genuine humility, or indifference, or sheer helplessness.

He who has not Christmas in his heart will never find it under a tree.

Only one person in a million becomes enlightened without a teacher's help.

The most civilized people are as near to barbarism as the most polished steel is to rust. Nations, like metals, have only a superficial brilliancy.

At the moment of childbirth, every woman has the same aura of isolation, as though she were abandoned, alone.

When there's a teacher who embodies presence, then it seems to come for a while through that opening. The teacher is an opening to presence.

To me, theater is a spiritual experience. Probably the reason I do theater is it, I guess, comes the closest to feeling like God, or to feeling a spiritual experience that people can have together.

Information, knowledge, is power. If you can control information, you can control people.