“You have never forgotten how home was more than just a language you grew inside your mouth before you said it in a way your tongue bled.”

So sing a soft lullaby to the things you hate about yourself, and get to know them too.

There is something moon-soaked and dawn-flavoured about her.

These are women made of terrible tempests and savage storms and the untamed unwanted.

Fearless already runs through your blood. Now do it justice.

You become the thing that hurts you until it can hurt you no more.

I am so afraid of disappointing the people I love, I often forget that I am someone I love too. And I need kindness just as much as I believe the people I love do.

Every woman is both match and spark, a light for each other from the dark.

Our stories don’t begin and end because men we once trusted have left them.

I hope you never doubt again that even when you are in pain, that you are a miracle, that every part of you is incredible.

Everyone has forgotten that Lucifer was beautiful too and God’s favorite till he fell.

Knowledge after all is a dark art, full to the brim with liberty, a trembling, malleable power.

People are going to betray you the way Judas betrayed Jesus, the way Brutus betrayed Caesar, and you will love them anyway.

Grief makes unlikely warriors out of us all.

These are girls made of dark lace and witchcraft and a little bit of vice.

But the universe never promised you this would be easy. After all, you are the hero here.

Tell them all what they tried to kill came back. Tell them all that I have come home.

The process of learning huge volumes of information about disease, of learning a specialised language, can ironically make one lose sight of the patient one came to serve;.

For one thing, she pronounced flowers ‘flars’ and I couldn’t let it slide.

At times it does not really matter what language you are speaking, especially when you are emotional and try to reach other hearts.

Language can also be play and music and beauty and desire and grief and rage and truth without always having to be message-driven or purely functional.

Mother Nature is always speaking. She speaks in a language understood within the peaceful mind of the sincere observer. Leopards, cobras, monkeys, rivers and trees; they all served as my teachers when I lived as a wanderer in the Himalayan foothills.

And then by the end of the third year they completely lose that ability, partly because we teach them the specialized language of medicine.

I think that phrase is the most horrible phrase in the English language – ‘I don’t know.’ It’s terribly embarrassing.

I feed on good soup, not beautiful language.