“I want to be careful not to throw all this away. This is happiness. I think this is what happiness is. I haven't got it yet, but I can sense it out there. I feel I'm close to it. Some days, I'm so ...”

“That sense of happiness just out beyond my reach - I'm not sure I'd grasped that exactly, but I'd got something close to it, contentment maybe, or at least a functioning routine with regular rewards.”

“It was entirely silent and I tried to breathe its peace.”

“The thought of all that happiness was hard to bear. What's the point of happiness when all it does is throw the facts of dying into clear relief?”

“I breathed and breathed and did feel some calmness enter in, though it was, as always, shot with a sense of loss. Loss and fear.”

“The thing about opium is that it makes pain or difficulty unimaginable.”

“I remembered Patels words, Surrender is not giving up, it is worship. Show me how to step, I said, so that it pleases you. Make me one with you and also this land. Be with me.”

“There is too much at stake for us to surrender to the politics of polarization.”

“Always say yes to the present moment. What could be more futile, more insane, than to create inner resistance to what already is? what could be more insane than to oppose life itself, which is now ...”