“A dim vastness is spread before our souls; the perceptions of our mind are as obscure as those of our vision... But alas! when we have attained our object, when the distant 'there' becomes the present 'here,' all is changed; we are as poor and circumscribed as ever, and our souls still languish for unattainable happiness.”

“Nothing can change the past, including thought. However, dwelling on thoughts about the past does change our experience of the Now. When we drag the past into the present, everything else that belongs to the Now is marginalized and overlooked. All we see is the past or, more accurately, our story about it. All we can ever have of the past is our story about it, and that story is very unsatisfying. Our stories about the past don't feed our soul like the Now does. And worse, any story is usually a sad tale that keeps us caught up in negative feelings, and then those feelings become our current experience of life.”

“We can never found the soul, just as we can never wound God, but we become imprisoned by our memories, and that makes our lives wretched, even when we have everything we need in order to be happy.”

“The soul itself is the center of all that we have come to call 'psychic.' The word itself translates literally to mean "of the soul." When we embrace our psychic potential, we embrace our soul's potential.”

“We don't present our voices to the audience, we resonate our souls.”

“We choose our thoughts. We choose our perceptions. We choose our attitudes.......And our lives become defined by our choices. - chief inspector Armand Gamache in Still Life”