“Perhaps your hunger to belong is always active and intense because you belonged so totally before you came here. This hunger to belong is the echo and reverberation of your invisible heritage. You are from somewhere else, where you were known, embraced and sheltered. This is also the secret root from which all longing grows. Something in you knows, perhaps remembers, that eternal belonging liberates longing into its surest and most potent creativity. This is why your longing is often wiser than your conventional sense of appropriateness, safety and truth... Your longing desires to take you towards the absolute realization of all the possibilities that sleep in the clay of your heart; it knows your eternal potential, and it will not rest until it is awakened.”

“That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.”

“Your character belongs to you; your reputation belongs to other people, who have their own interests at heart, and they use it to control you, not to depict you.”

“On the day when the weight deadens on your shoulders and you stumble, may the clay dance to balance you.”

“All my heart is yours, sir: it belongs to you; and with you it would remain, were fate to exile the rest of me from your presence forever.”

“You have traveled too fast over false ground;Now your soul has come to take you back.Take refuge in your senses, open upTo all the small miracles you rushed through.Become inclined to watch the way of rainWhen it falls slow and free.Imitate the habit of twilight,Taking time to open the well of colorThat fostered the brightness of day.Draw alongside the silence of stoneUntil its calmness can claim you.”

“For Equilibrium, a Blessing:Like the joy of the sea coming home to shore,May the relief of laughter rinse through your soul.As the wind loves to call things to dance,May your gravity by lightened by grace.Like the dignity of moonlight restoring the earth,May your thoughts incline with reverence and respect.As water takes whatever shape it is in,So free may you be about who you become.As silence smiles on the other side of what's said,May your sense of irony bring perspective.As time remains free of all that it frames,May your mind stay clear of all it names.May your prayer of listening deepen enoughto hear in the depths the laughter of god.”