Misery, like yoga, is not a competitive sport

There is this idea that you either read to escape or you read to find yourself. I don't really see the difference. We find ourselves through the process of escaping.

Minds have their own weather systems. You are in a hurricane. Hurricanes run out of energy eventually. Hold on.

Forcing yourself to see the world through love's gaze can be healthy. Love is an attitude to life. It can save us.

That kind of monotony that running generates - the one soundtracked by heavy breathing and the steady rhythm of feet on pavements - became a kind of metaphor for depression.

One cliche attached to bookish people is that they are lonely, but for me books were my way out of being lonely.

The way out is never through yourself.

I wanted to be dead. No. That's not quite right. I didn't want to be dead, I just didn't want to be alive.

Goals are the source of misery. An unattained goal causes pain, but actually achieving it brings only a brief satisfaction.

A million people a year kill themselves. Between ten and twenty million people a year try to. Worldwide, men are over three times more likely to kill themselves than women.

Hate is a pointless emotion to have inside you. It is like eating a scorpion to punish it for stinging you.

Be with someone who willingly runs in the storm with you, not someone who cowers away because of turbulent winds.

I go about saying how pained and tormented, how lonely and sad I feel, but what do I really mean by that? If I were to speak the truth, I would die.

Most of us know about God, but that is quite different from knowing God.

For the first time since her return, she felt pain, a violent pain, but it made her feel alive, because it was worth feeling.

[Calling you a] star is just a trick. It's like a straw man thing. They [people] set you up just to knock you over. It's bull. You avoid it, I avoid it.

If you're feeling pressure, then you shouldn't be here.

The smartest advertising is the advertising that communicates the best and respects the consumer's intelligence.

If you have a dog or a cat, you know how developed they can be. How sensitive, how aware. They suffer. We all do.

Fasting is a medicine.

...people have always known, at least since Moses denounced the Golden Calf, that images were dangerous, that they can captivate the onlooker and steal the soul.