It seemed incredible to me that day without premonitions or symbols should be the one of my inexorable death .

So plant your own gardens and decorate your own soul, instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.

Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time.

Don't talk unless you can improve the silence.

I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.

I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books.

The worst labyrinth is not that intricate form that can entrap us forever, but a single and precise straight line

The fact is that poetry is not the books in the library . . . Poetry is the encounter of the reader with the book, the discovery of the book.

Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.

I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the hunger of my heart, I am trying to bribe you with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat.

The original is unfaithful to the translation.

Analysis is the art of creation through destruction.

An old man's advice is not an opinion

It may look like we're doing nothing when we sit zazen. But actually we are exposing ourselves to ourselves.

Way over yonder is a place I have seen In a garden of wisdom from some long ago dream.

What is the beginning? Love. What is the course. Love still. What the goal. The goal is love.

Memory doesn't erase. The recall ability fails.

If you have created an image of yourself at 13 and it is still with you at 17, it needs to be dropped.

Love is too large, too deep ever to be truly understood or measured or limited within the framework of words.

Publishers see free downloads as threatening the sales of the book.

The cafe windows wrapped all the way around the observation floor, which gave us a beautiful panoramic view of the skeleton army that had come to kill us.