“Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious.”

You are not your bank account, or your ambitiousness. You’re not the cold clay lump with a big belly you leave behind when you die. You’re not your collection of walking personality disorders. You are spirit, you are love.

Love is so much bigger than our ignorance.

Here are the two best prayers I know: ‘Help me, help me, help me’ and ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you.

To love yourself as you are is a miracle, and to seek yourself is to have found yourself for now. And now is all we have, and love is who we are.

Getting into a new relationship is like pouring Miracle-Gro on your character defects.

Laughter is a bubbly, effervescent form of holiness.

Or you might shout at the top of your lungs or whisper into your sleeve, “I hate you, God.” That is a prayer too, because it is real, it is truth, and maybe it is the first sincere thought you’ve had in months.

Butterflies and birds are like one perfect teaspoon of creation.

You can get the monkey off your back, but the circus never leaves town.

If we stay where we are, where we’re stuck, where we’re comfortable and safe, we die there… When nothing new can get in, that’s death.

I do not know much about God and prayer, but I have come to believe over the last twenty-five years, that there’s something to be said about keeping prayer simple. Help, Thanks, Wow.

Hope begins in the dark.

My mind is a neighborhood I try not to go into alone.

Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.

I can tell you that what you’re looking for is already inside you.

And she is going to dance, dance hungry, dance full, dance each cold astonishing moment, now when she is young and again when she is old.

It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.

Like too much alcohol, self-consciousness makes us see ourselves double.

Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.

Perhaps consciousness arises when the brain’s simulation of the world becomes so complex that it must include a model of itself.

I’m very aware and very conscious of the path I chose in life, and very aware of the path I didn’t choose.

Anger is like a storm rising up from the bottom of your consciousness. When you feel it coming, turn your focus to your breath.

While I am working I am not conscious of what I am putting on the canvas.

Consciousness is a concept that can sound esoteric, but all it really means is caring.