Watching them, I feel at once happy and lonely. It’s not the loneliness of being without a mate, but something more primal. As though I were the only being left on this side of the glass, while the re...
The pleasures that arise from sense-objects are bound to end, and thus they are only sources of pain. Don’t get attached to them.
The fates are cruel, Bheeshma whispered, and they’ve been crueler than usual to you. But the sins you committed in ignorance are not your fault. I’ll still have to pay for them, Karna said. Isn’t that...
So this, too, was true of love: it could make us forget our own needs. It could make us strong even when the world was collapsing around us.
Pain makes us crazy. All we want is to throw the live coal of it as far from us as we can, not thinking what we might set afire.
Open yourself to the sight, and it will show you what you need to know. But never attempt to bend it to your will. Never pry into a particular life that has been brought to your care. That is to break...
Once I heard my mother say that each of us lives in a separate universe, one that we have dreamed into being. We love people when their dream coincides with ours, the way two cutout designs laid one o...
O exhilaration, I thought. To be lifted up through the eye of chaos, to balance breath-stopped on the edge of nothing. And the plunge that would follow, the shattering of my matchstick body to smither...
Love was full of contradictions. Sometimes the person you loved weakened you and sometimes he or she made you a stronger person.
I have to believe in possibility. How else can we bear the enormous weight of life?
Forgive me, Sister, I said silently, you who are the unsung heroine of this tale, the one who has the tougher role: to wait and to worry.
And if I wasn't able to bar anger, or her insidious cousin, irritation, From my heart, at least some of the time I bit back the sharp comments that I had prided myself on dispensing so freely all thes...
A wind rose around me, from where I didn't know. It was unexpectedly cold and made me shiver. 'Sacrifice, sacrifice', whispered the trees, carrying my promise across the valley
A well-meaning man, Dhai Ma liked to say, is more dangerous because he believes in the rightness of what he does. Give me an honest rascal any day!
A situation in itself, he said, is neither happy nor unhappy. It’s only your response to it that causes your sorrow.
Don't create snakes out of ropes. You have enough to worry about.
Weeping is not bad. It clears out the heart, making space in it for growth.
We had known it would be hard to leave this island of women where on our skin the warm rain fell like pomegranate seeds, where we woke to birdcall and slept to the First Mother’s singing, where we swa...
The story hangs in the night air between them. It is very latem, and if father or daugther stepped to the window, tehyw ould see the Suktara, star of the impending dawn, hanging low in the sky. But th...
She did understand about sacrificing values for the sake of love. It was a lesson all mothers had to memorize.