“If you're trapped in a room, and nobody is coming to save you, what can you do? You have to bang on the walls and break the windows. You have to climb out and save yourself. It's obvious, Li-ling, ...”

“I wondered: what happens when a hundred thousand people memorize the same poem? Does anything change?”

“The only life that matters is in your mind. The only truth is the one that lives invisibly, that waits even after you close the book. Silence, too, is a kind of music. Silence will last.”

“Was there anyone in this world who could taste something delicious-economic freedom and political reform-a taste that was salty and fattening and sweet and promising, and only be satisfied with one...”

“The young man murmured in his sleep and said, Dear Sparrow, and Sparrow felt, for the first time, how the purest joy could be a heaviness.”

“How does a copy become more than a copy? Is art the creation of something new and original, or simply the continuous enlargement, or the distillation, of an observation that came before”

“Without energy being invested in resisting the unwanted or dueling with fears, we have more energy and attention available for noticing not only the disturbing, but the wonderful...When we are not ...”

“Despite all the identifying, measuring, photographing, I had managed to set the experience in a kind of present past, a having looked, even as I was temporally and physically still looking...It is ...”

“A person must make peace with oneself before they will find peace with the world.”

“I have little use for religion as it is practiced, or for astrology, or for belief in witchcraft or omens of good or ill-luck. I think they all stem from some insufficiency in mens minds, perhaps f...”

“It is only the innocent mind which knows what love is, and the innocent mind can live in the world which is not innocent.”

“So if you can look at all things without allowing pleasure to creep in - at a face, a bird, the colour of a sari, the beauty of a sheet of water shimmering in the sun, or anything that gives deligh...”

“Think of the jazz improv artist responding to the musical banter among her fellow players onstage. Aside from whatever training they've done in advance, as soon as the curtain opens, they move into...”

“Hurrying and delaying are alike ways of trying to resist the present.”

“Absence sharpens love, presence strengthens it.”