“I wonder if pain comes from surrendering or resisting?”

“Bravery is the ability to endure, even unto death, all types of terrible, terrifying and painful situations and we live in a time when people do all that they can to avoid hardship and pain, never ...”

“The empath helps others by absorbing some of their pain, but who helps the empath?”

“Affliction equips the suffering to empathize with others in anguish and not only does it strengthen them, it enables them to be consoling comforters in a world full of hurt.”

“How much pain a person detains may be proportionate to the pain they spare others when they'd rather hurt than hurt another.”

“There is the purity of love, harmonious in every way, but not meant for a lifetime, and then there is the steady love of commitment - no less real but completely different. She had both.”

“I finally know the difference between pleasing and loving, obeying and respecting. It has taken me so many years to be okay with being different, and with being this alive, this intense. (xxvi)”

“Spring passes and one remembers one's innocence.Summer passes and one remembers one's exuberance.Autumn passes and one remembers one's reverence.Winter passes and one remembers one's perseverance.”

“Birthdays could be such a bummer when you were older than the country you lived in.”

“A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment.”

“I've always said that idleness dulls the spirit. We have to keep the brain busy, or at least the hands if we don't have a brain.”

“If your workplace was somehow transplanted into the jungle and everyone was forced to survive at a very primitive level, it's safe to say that eventually your boss would rape you.”