Keeping secrets is a consequential act for all involved.

Smiling at someone can have significant health consequences.

Seeking happiness is not the problem. The problem is that we often do not know where and how to find genuine happiness and so make the mistakes that cause suffering for ourselves & others.

When you recognize and reflect on even one good thing about yourself, you are building a bridge to a place of kindness and caring.

Never feel ashamed of your longing for happiness.

Clinging to our ideas of perfection isolates us from life and is a barrier.

For any marginalized group to change the story that society tells about them takes courage and perseverance.

The idea that traumatic residues—or unresolved stories—can be inherited is groundbreaking.

The unconscious mind is a vast repository of experiences and associations that sorts things out much faster than the slow-moving conscious mind.

Buddhism has a term for the happiness we feel at someone else’s success or good fortune. Sympathetic joy, as it is known, invites us to celebrate for others.

Even as we recognize our resentment, bitterness, or jealousy, we can also honor our own wish to be happy, to feel free.

I suppose that we women are such cowards that we think a man will save us from fears, and we marry him.

She lifts a bowl of kheer and her thoughts, flittering like dusty sparrows in a brown back alley, turn a sudden kingfisher blue.

I remember when, I remember, I remember when I lost my mind! There was something so special about that place...even your emotions had an echo...and so much space!

Am I falling in love? She thought, is it safe to do so with this man? She thought, I don't need to answer.

That which compels us to create a substitute for ourselves is not the external lack of objects, but our incapacity to lovingly include a thing outside of ourselves

Life is a series of dreams, a series of interlocking awarenesses.

I worked all through my 20's, all through my 30's, so I've been lucky to be working.

People are generally opposed to things they know nothing about.

I'm mad about being old and I'm mad about being American. Apart from that, OK.

I would always love this fragile human girl, for the rest of my limitless existence.