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That is what growing up means, in some simple way: learning to repress all expressions of pure happiness and joy.
“Well, this world is a school and we are its students. Each of us studies something as we pass through. Some people learn love, kindness. Others, I’m afraid, abuse and brutality. But the best students are those who acquire generosity and compassion from their encounters with hardship and cruelty.
The ones who choose not to inflict their suffering on to others. And what you learn is what you take with you to your grave.”
“Hatred is a poison served in three cups. The first is when people despise those they desire—because they want to have them in their possession. It’s all out of hubris! The second is when people loathe those they do not understand. It’s all out of fear! Then there is the third kind—when people hate those they have hurt.”
Those who survive nurse their broken hearts and start all
over again, as one always does, as one always must.”
She often wakes, to the minute, at this interstice between midnight and dawn. Brahmamuhurtha, the time of the Creator, when light energy is at its strongest, according to various faiths.
“Why are women left out of history? Why do we have to piece their stories back together from fragments—like broken shards of pottery?”
That’s the thing about failing: either it makes you super-afraid of failing again or, somehow, you learn to overcome fear.”
“You mean he failed—like any other human being.”
“Where you have set your mind begin the journey Let your heart have no fear, keep your eyes on me.”
Empires have a way of deceiving themselves into believing that, being superior to others, they will last forever. A shared expectation that tomorrow the sun will rise again, the earth will remain fertile, and the waters will never run dry. A comforting delusion that, though we will all die, the buildings we erect and the poems we compose and the civilizations we create will survive.
She says when we look at a person all we see in that moment is a partial image of them, often subconsciously biased.
They appear successful and content, and so we conclude there must be something wrong with us, since we cannot be more like them. But that image is not the full reality and nor are we that simple or static.
