Dinner with Buddha Quotes

“There are teachers who say that one of the main obstacles, spiritual obstacles, for westerners is a sense of unworthiness, a self-limiting sense of what’s possible for them in a human life.”
― Roland Merullo, Dinner with Buddha: A Novel

“It’s like the difference between a kid who goes to school and learns and a kid who goes to school and learns and comes home to parents who are reading to her and talking to her about the world, showing her things, teaching by their actions.”
― Roland Merullo, Dinner with Buddha: A Novel

“that if she clears her mind down to the deepest level then three things will happen: she’ll never be afraid; it will be easier to love people; and it will be easier to die.”
― Roland Merullo, Dinner with Buddha: A Novel

“Though we do not wholly believe it yet, the interior life is a real life, and the intangible dreams of people have a tangible effect on the world. —James Baldwin”
― Roland Merullo, Dinner with Buddha: A Novel

“next, showed up for work in the morning, washed the dishes, fed the dog, settled down in front of the TV to gaze at the lives of others, imaginary and real, as we plodded along toward old age. On”
― Roland Merullo, Dinner with Buddha: A Novel

“try if you can to not stay in the small box of old thinking.”
― Roland Merullo, Dinner with Buddha: A Novel

“If I look at you”—he pointed to a very old woman who seemed to be teetering in her chair on the far left-hand end of the first row—“and I see not woman, not person, but piece of the energy of God, the same energy that is inside me, how can I hurt you? How can I able to think bad on you? No. You see?” The”
― Roland Merullo, Dinner with Buddha: A Novel

“I think sometimes this is why we meditate, because when we meditate we can make the thoughts slow, and in between the thoughts is becomes a space, and in this space you have maybe something like the emptiness, the not-any-word. Maybe then we start, just a little bit start, not finish, to see the mystery without the clothes on. The naked mystery of life. We start to see the world a little bit that it is not separate one thing from the other, one person from the other, that it is maybe all the energy of the mind of the Divine Engineer, everything connected.” To”
― Roland Merullo, Dinner with Buddha: A Novel

“Italian or Irish or Nigerian American. We wore Brooks Brothers or Izod or Polo or Levi’s, we opened our mouth and said one word about abortion or taxes or God or radical Islam or military service or Bush or Obama or Fox or NPR or we said we were from Mississippi or North Dakota or the West Village or Boulder and within the time it took to say “box” we were in one. We’d somehow gotten to be straight white males or gay African American females first, and human beings second, and if you claimed the eschewment of label you’d be mocked, dismissed, labeled as a naive rube from beyond the Adirondacks. “How”
― Roland Merullo, Dinner with Buddha: A Novel

“Don’t look at people by their category—gender, race, social standing, age—but relate to them inside-to-inside, soul-to-soul, from and to that place where we’re so much more alike than different. A notion like that would be fodder for mockery. My friends and I—most Americans—lived in a stew of propaganda that insisted on the categorization of humanity. We were gay or straight, we were male or female or part of each, we were conservative or liberal, black or white or red or yellow or brown or mixed”
― Roland Merullo, Dinner with Buddha: A Novel

“Isn’t the spiritual search, at its essence, a movement toward objectivity?”
― Roland Merullo, Dinner with Buddha: A Novel