“Discover that we are capable of solitary joy and having experienced it, know that we have touched the core of self.”

When it’s gentle, you go sailing, have a picnic, take a swim.

Death reminds us that we are part of the same river, the same flow from the same source, rushing towards the same destiny. Were you close? Yes, but we didn’t know it then.

The hot, moist smell of babies fresh from naps.

Grief is like the wind. When it’s blowing hard, you adjust your sails and run before it. If it blows too hard, you stay in the harbor, close the hatches and don’t take calls.

From beginning to end this is a wet and blood smeared voyage, this begetting and birthing and moving away.

A red brick Presbyterian church… captured by kudzu vines as surely as a butterfly in a net.

Siblings may be ambivalent about their relationships in life, but in death the power of their bond strangles the surviving heart.

If I’m being forced to do something I don’t want to do, my real self comes out. But whether or not I’m aware of it, no matter what happens, I’m always going to have a fake self and I’m not going to judge my fake self.

When we give up our images of self-importance and our ideas of what should be, we can help things become what they need to be.

Man is a wonder to himself; he can neither govern nor know himself.

Then when I fire, you see, I have the verdict of self-defence on my side. I know that he is pretty certain in his hurry, to miss. I never do.

Some people will never be able to get their real self, but that’s fine, because their fake self is also part of them.

It is not the money but the self-respect and wanting to create good music.

To attribute to God, and not to self, whatever good one sees in oneself; but to recognize always that the evil is one’s own doing, and to impute it on one’s self.

Love is the ultimate giving, an expression of one’s best self.