The stars we are given. The constellations we make. That is to say, stars exist in the cosmos, but constellations are the imaginary lines we draw between them, the readings we give the sky, the stories we tell.
Formerly, when I would feel a desire to understand someone, or myself, I would take into consideration not actions, in which everything is relative, but wishes. Tell me what you want and I'll tell you who you are.
Then the cow asked: "What is a mirror?" "It is a hole in the wall," said the cat. "You look in it, and there you see the picture, and it is so dainty and charming and ethereal and inspiring in its unimaginable beauty that your head turns round and ro...
True character is revealed in the choices a human being makes under pressure - the greater the pressure, the deeper the revelation, the truer the choice to the character's essential nature.
Mankind has a mandate to care for the earth and all that is within it, especially the animals, and an animal should never be placed in a position where he needs to be concerned about such things. But this is not that time.
Do research. Feed your talent. Research not only wins the war on cliche, it's the key to victory over fear and it's cousin, depression.
Angry contradiction of the patriarch is not creativity; it's delinquency calling for attention. Difference for the sake of difference is as empty an achievement as slavishly following the commercial imperative.
When we want mood experiences, we go to concerts or museums. When we want meaningful emotional experience, we go to the storyteller.
[Nonviolence] is directed against forces of evil rather than against persons who happen to be doing the evil. It is evil that the nonviolent resister seeks to defeat, not the persons victimized by evil.
The Peruvian flute music is . . . cool. In this music, they have not yet invented the industrial revolution that leads to excessive punctuality or the failed experiment they call the nuclear family. This is the music of elements, untarnished, unrehea...
Each day of not writing, of comfort, of being that which he despised, dulled his ability and softened his will to work so that, finally, he did no work at all.
The divine pattern is your life purpose. It is a story about your divine self and it is written within—your heart
The humiliation of growing up a Jew in the Soviet Union, of cleaning piss-stained bathrooms in the States, of worshiping a country that would collapse as simply and inelegantly as the one he had abandoned.
No matter our talent, we all know in the midnight of our souls that 90 percent of what we do is less than our best.
Stories are full of people who find that, in extreme situations, they’re capable of so much more than they imagined they were. Real life is full of people who find that they’re capable of so much less.
The stories people tell you about themselves seem to retain the possibility of being false. But what you discover about them by yourself seems to be the truth.
In those days I learned that nothing is more frightening than a hero who lives to tell his story, to tell what all those who fell at his side will never be able to tell.
What I learn today I shall know forever. Whether or not I remember that I know it is a different story.
If my mom told one more story about how cute I looked in the bathtub when I was three years old I was going to burrow into the snow and freeze myself to death.
The mind that thought of light, heavy, grey, yellow, still, swift, also conceived of magic that would make heavy things light and be able to fly, turn grey lead into yellow gold, and the still rock into a swift water.
You couldn't relive your life, skipping the awful parts, without losing what made it worthwhile. You had to accept it as a whole--like the world, or the person you loved.
