I’ll put it to you simply: love is the enemy. That’s my conclusion. We should all live in our little monk cells and never venture out ...

Was there anything quite so painful, so fraught with the possibilities of hurt, as gift giving within a family?

Soon would come the night in which there was no more work – not the work of the hands, nor the work of the mind, nor the work of the heart.

Still, for all that, her life had lacked passion. The demons had never come for her.

Education teaches children to lose interest in what matters most to them.

Just because you pretend the universe doesn't have teeth doesn't mean you won't get eaten in the end.

The body was an organic machine, period, and God was a figment of its fitful imagination.

But men are such strange creatures, really. I think most of them would rather we weren’t around at all, so they could just spend time mooning over each other. Hero worship and all that stuff.

The past is the past. It’s the present we should worry about.

It was a failure of pedagogical nerve, she reminded herself, to give up on a student.

All desire, Tracy had had occasion since to think, is to some degree monstrous.

Feelings are not facts

If fear is cultivated it will become stronger. If faith is cultivated it will achieve the mastery ... faith is the stronger emotion because it is positive whereas fear is negative.

If you saw Queen Elizabeth it would be amazing, she came from another planet. She was so attractive in what she was wearing.

Jihad and the rifle alone. NO negotiations, NO conferences and NO dialogue

Spiritual maturity does not mean that we will never make wrong plans. In fact, spiritual maturity often means having the courage to admit we've made the wrong plans.

Being polite to a person is not a sign of respect for them. It is merely a sign of a good upbringing and a balanced nature.

It is when people do wrong things wilfully that they are the more likely to do them again.

There needs to be someone who can lead you in the right direction.

My God grant me love for that which has splendor, but in this time of my life let me strive for attainable things.

The only enlightened masters I know are the people that I see every day and the people that I've seen through my life who have had the understanding, at some level, that we're here to express love.