Lunch with Buddha Quotes

“My father he always say that the oil is already inside the student, already there from all time. The teacher only has a match and makes it light, and then the student isn’t a student anymore, just a friend, going the same way down the dark road but seeing now by himself.”
― Roland Merullo, Lunch with Buddha

“The real work was the identification of those aspects of yourself that led to what he called “the negative emotions”—anger, envy, bitterness, greed, cynicism, hatred and the like—things that poured hurt into an already overfull world.”
― Roland Merullo, Lunch with Buddha

“I wondered if we had reached that point now in America, if Christianity and capitalism both had ossified. Enormous corporations and megachurches, each with their rules and propaganda, their need to eliminate competition, eccentricity, otherness. Wasn’t it time for some brave new spirit to speak a fresh truth? Could these really be, as the radio preahers insisted, the ‘end times?’ Maybe just their end of their times, I thought, and the beginning of better.”
― Roland Merullo, Lunch with Buddha

“Buddha, after he taught his disciples for many many years, he held up for them one leaf from a tree… ‘This one leaf here, this is how much I taught you all these years,’ he said to them. ‘And the billions of leaves in the forest are the other of what you could learn.”
― Roland Merullo, Lunch with Buddha

“JFK was an asylum, a processing plant, a study in chaos—snaking lines, recorded announcements, furious passengers with their taped-up baggage, clerks fielding complaints in the midst of the madness. For the better part of an hour”
― Roland Merullo, Lunch with Buddha

“I took one breath and realized I could be angry a bit later if I wanted to be angry. There would always be time for that. There was no rush. I could resist the reflex. And so I did.”
― Roland Merullo, Lunch with Buddha

“We hadn’t yet traded freedom for comfort.”
― Roland Merullo, Lunch with Buddha

“I mused about the human phenomenon that went by the title “organized religion.” What, I wondered, was disorganized religion?”
― Roland Merullo, Lunch with Buddha