“There are borderlines and there are borderlines. Labels do violence to people. You can’t treat the label; you have to treat the person behind the label. (17)”

Religion has everything on its side: revelation, prophecies, government protection, the highest dignity and eminence. . . and more than this, the invaluable prerogative of being allowed to imprint its doctrines on the mind at a tender age of childhood, whereby they become almost innate ideas.

I dream of a love that is more than two people craving to possess one another.

One thing I feel clear about is that it’s important not to let your life live you. Otherwise, you end up at forty feeling you haven’t really lived. What have I learned? Perhaps to live now, so that at fifty I won’t look back upon my forties with regret.

As we reach the crest of life and look at the path before us, we apprehend that the path no longer ascends but slopes downward toward decline and diminishment. From that point on, concerns about death are never far from mind.

Indeed, the evidence supporting the efficacy of group therapy, and the prevailing sentiment of the mental health profession, are sufficiently strong that it would be difficult to defend the adequacy of the inpatient unit that attempted to operate without a small group program.

There is some evidence, for example, that those who enter the death-related professions (soldiers, doctors, priests, and morticians) may in part be motivated by a need to obtain control over death anxiety.

All these things I’ve written so much about. That’s why I’ve made such a practice really, over and over to hammer home the point of self-revelation and being more of yourself and showing yourself. Every book I write I want to get that in there.

One comprehends oneself in order not to be preoccupied with oneself.

Pandora’s box, but to re-enter life in a richer, more compassionate manner.

Some have expressed the very opposite feeling–the fear that they would not be interesting enough to write about.

Some day soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has ever known me. That’s when I will be truly dead – when I exist in no one’s memory.

To care of another individual means to know and to experience the other as fully as possible.

Life is a spark between two identical voids, the darkness before birth and the one after death.

Mirroring, softly, barely audibly, just under the membrane of consciousness.

The death anxiety of many people is fueled … by disappointment at never having fulfilled their potential.

My hunch is yes. It would certainly do something for those who are most ruthless, who tend to make others most miserable.

Realize that if a door closed, it’s because what was behind it wasn’t meant for you.

Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road.

I’m praying for patience and falling behind.

I’m still trying to fix up the wreckage you left behind, the chaotic strings of misery you let fall to the floor. Each piece delicately piercing my skin, the red glow a contrast to my continual white limbs.

Traveling is my kryptonite. Offer me a ticket to exploration and I will leave everything important in my life behind. Because the nights I get to be a wanderer of this world are the nights I can finally sleep.

Run. Run as fast as you can it doesn’t matter where as long as you feel the wind against your skin. As long as you leave everything safe behind you and don’t look back.

There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind.

We don’t turn back. We leave no one behind. We pull each other up.