I prayed to rediscover my childhood, and it has come back, and I feel that it is just as difficult as it used to be, and that growing older has served no purpose at all.

The highest form of love is to be the protector of another person’s solitude.

Go into yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life flows.

Let everything happen to you Beauty and terror Just keep going No feeling is final

Perhaps somewhere, someplace deep inside your being, you have undergone important changes while you were sad.

Make your ego porous. Will is of little importance, complaining is nothing, fame is nothing. Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything.

Where something becomes extremely difficult and unbearable, there we also stand always already quite near its transformation.

This is what the things can teach us: to fall, patiently to trust our heaviness. Even a bird has to do that before he can fly.

And now we welcome the new year, full of things that have never been

But your solitude will be a support and a home for you, even in the midst of very unfamiliar circumstances, and from it you will find all your paths.

If we surrendered to earth's intelligence we could rise up rooted, like trees.

From now until eternity meets its end, you will walk by faith and not by sight.

They tell us to count our blessings whilst they count the coffers

In many ways, a degree in the history of ideas is the ideal training for an aspiring writer.

I wanted to destroy everything beautiful I'd never have.

In Italy, for the same price as a typical British hamburger meal including sweet, a builder's labourer could eat like a king - rather better in fact, because pasta dishes gain from being kept simple.

Foaly twitched his tail contentedly. Genius. No point in being humble about it.

Without a job all there is to life is boredom and insecurity.

I feel so lucky to have done so many things that I love in the past few years so I'm just going to keep trying to do them.

As countries grapple with modernization, people who are left behind tend to hold firmer and firmer to their view of the evil of modernity.

I don't miss another opportunity to try to do my best to finish the things I have left undone. I could say: It's my unresolved karma that wakes me up in the morning.