“What a journey...what a day...what madness, so much worse than tragic! What to do except dance, dance, only dance...”

“Hema thought of Shiva, her personal deity, and how the only sensible response to the madness of life . . . was to cultivate a kind of madness within, to perform the mad dance of Shiva, . . . to rock and sway and flap six arms and six legs to an inner tune. Hema moved gently . . . she danced as if her minimalist gestures were shorthand for a much larger, fuller, reckless dance, one that held the whole world together, kept it from extinction.”

“How beautiful and horrible life is, Hema thought; too horrible to simply call tragic. Life is worse than tragic." p 108”

“A man is only as rich as the number of children he fathers. After all, what else do we leave behind in this world...”

“What did it say when a man had fewer clothes than books?”

“We are all fixing what is broken. It is the task of a lifetime. We'll leave much unfinished for the next generation.”

“It seems we humans never learn. And so we relearn the lesson every generation and then want to write epistles. We proselytize to our friends and shake them by the shoulders and tell them, "Seize the day! What matters is THIS moment!”