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“To all who walk the dark path, and to those who walk in the sunshine but hold out a hand in the darkness to travel beside us: Brighter days are coming. Clearer sight will arrive. And you will arrive too. No, it might not be forever. The bright moments might be for a few days at a time, but hold on for those days. Those days are worth the dark.”

“I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead. Let them become the photograph on the table. Let them become the name on the trust account. Let go of them in the water.”

“Nobody wants to remember trauma. In that regard society is no different from the victims themselves. We all want to live in a world that is safe, manageable, and predictable, and victims remind us that this is not always the case. In order to understand trauma, we have to overcome our natural reluctance to confront that reality and cultivate the courage to listen to the testimonies of survivors.”

“What can we do, then, in the lives of others? We can use the most effective tool we have for getting other people to change: influence.”

“Who you are is always a more vital teaching and a more powerful transformer of the world than what you say, and more essential even that what you do.”

“When you say "no" to a person or a situation, let it come not from reaction but from insight, from a clear realization of what is right or not right for you at that moment. Let it be a nonreactive "no", a high quality "no", a "no" that is free of all negativity and so creates no further suffering.”

“The world is shattered and we wander barefoot through one another’s broken shards and glittering slivers. And some of us bleed from the cuts. And some of us heal. And if you’re lucky, you do both. We are broken. We are healing. It never ends. And, if you look at it in just the right light, it is beautiful.”

“People are strange: they are constantly angered by trivial things, but on a major matter like totally wasting their lives, they hardly seem to notice.”

“How did we all get so screwed up? Putting aside our damaged parents, poverty, abuse, addiction, disease, and other unpleasantries, life just damages people. There is no way around this. Not all the glitter and concealer in the world can cover it up. We may have been raised in the illusion that if we play our cards right, life would work out. But it didn’t, it doesn’t.“

"Love is not something to do, but something to be experienced, and something to go through — that must be why it frightens so many of us and why we so often approach it indirectly. Here is this novel, made with love. Here is this banana bread, made with love. If it wasn’t for this habit of indirection, of course, there would be no culture in this world, and very little meaningful pleasure for any of us."

“There’s freedom in hitting bottom (…) relief in admitting you’ve reached the place of great unknowing. This is where restoration can begin, because when you’re still in the state of trying to fix the unfixable, everything bad is engaged: the chatter of your mind, the tension of your physiology, all the trunks and wheel-ons you carry from the past. It’s exhausting, crazy-making. Help. Help us walk through this. Help us come through. It is the first great prayer.”

“Y este amor más humano, que se consumará de modo infinitamente delicado y cuidadoso, bueno y nítido en todo cuanto anude y desanude, se asemejará a ese amor que preparamos luchando duramente: el amor que consiste en que dos soledades se protejan, se limiten y se reverencien, una a la otra.”

“También es bueno amar, puesto que el amor es difícil. El amor de un ser humano por otro es quizá lo más difícil que nos ha sido encomendado; es lo supremo, la última prueba y examen, el trabajo ante el cual todos los otros no son más que preparativos.”

"Crecer como lo hace el árbol, que no apresura su savia y que resiste, confiado, las tormentas de primavera, sin angustiarse por la posibilidad de no llegar al próximo verano. Y el verano llega, pero sólo para quienes tienen paciencia y viven despreocupados y tranquilos, como si ante ellos se extendiese la eternidad. Lo aprendo cotidianamente; lo aprendo en medio de sufrimientos a los cuales agradezco: la paciencia lo es todo."

"To all who walk the dark path, and to those who walk in the sunshine but hold out a hand in the darkness to travel beside us: Brighter days are coming. Clearer sight will arrive. And you will arrive too. No, it might not be forever. The bright moments might be for a few days at a time, but hold on for those days. Those days are worth the dark."

“I know it will pass. I remind myself it will pass. It’s like reminding myself that I don’t need to breathe when I’m underwater. My body doesn’t believe it. My head doesn’t either. But my past says it will past. And my past has never lied the way depression lies to me, so I take a deep breath and keep moving forward, even though I’ve forgotten where I was going.”