“It's always the same old problem: how to find ourselves in the great yammering of ego and tragedy and discomfort and obsession with everyone else's destinies.”

“We're all afraid of the same stuff. Mostly we're afraid that we're secretly not okay, that we're disgusting, or frauds, or about to be diagnosed with cancer. ... We want to teach you how to quiet the yammer ... how you can create comfort, inside and outside, how you can get warm, how you can feed yourself. And even learn to get through silence. ... There is a wilderness inside you, and a banquet. Both. [p. 253]”

“You have to be a warrior and say, "Maybe it's everyone else's system, but it's not mine." (from her recent interview here, on Goodreads)”

“We begin to find and become ourselves when we notice how we are already found, already truly, entirely, wildly, messily, marvelously who we were born to be.”

“Everything was coming together by coming apart . . . It is the most difficult Zen practice to leave people to their destiny, even though it's painful - just loving them, and breathing with them, and distracting them in a sweet way, and laughing with them . . . if something was not my problem, I probably did not have the solution.”

“Never compare your insides to everyone else's outsides.”

“... the reason life works at all is that not everyone in your tribe is nuts on the same day. [pp. 65-66]”