“It had to teach her to think of love as a state of grace: not the means to anything but the alpha and omega, an end it itself.”

When I wake up,” he said, “remind me that I’m going to marry her.

But when a woman decides to sleep with a man, there is no wall she will not scale, no fortress she will not destroy, no moral consideration she will not ignore at its very root: there is no God worth worrying about.

But that afternoon he asked himself, with his infinite capacity for illusion, if such pitiless indifference might not be a subterfuge for hiding the torments of love.

All my life, I’ve been frightened at the moment I sit down to write.

Wisdom comes to us when it can no longer do any good.

An early-rising man is a good spouse but a bad husband.

One can be in love with several people at the same time, feel the sorrow with each, and not betray any of them.

Humanity, like armies in the field, advances at the speed of the slowest.

The heart’s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good.

Wherever they might be they always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end.

Love does not die, when someone gets old, people get old, because they can not love anymore.

They enjoyed the miracle of loving each other as much at the table as in bed, and they grew to be so happy that even when they were two worn-out old people they kept on blooming like children and playing together like dogs.

Over the years they both reached the same wise conclusion by different paths: it was not possible to live together in any other way, or love in any other way, and nothing in this world was more difficult than love.

Become a better person and be sure to know who you are, before meeting someone new and hoping that person knows who you are.

Just as real events are forgotten, some that never were can be in our memories as if they happened.

It is not that the girl is unfit for everything, it is that she is not of this world.

When we let go of our battles and open our hearts to things as they are, then we come to rest in the present moment. This is the beginning and the end of spiritual practice.

The only way to become excellent is to be endlessly fascinated by doing the same thing over and over. You have to fall in love with boredom.

That is the difference between good teachers and great teachers: good teachers make the best of a pupil’s means; great teachers foresee a pupil’s ends.

Resistance is greatest just before the finish line.

In the end, the best way to succeed is to go small. And when you go small, you say no – a lot. A lot more than you might have even considered before.

In the end, just three things matter: How well we have lived How well we have loved How well we have learned to let go.

I have tried this letting go part and ended up holding you closer then before. – everyday.

Ends are for yesterday, not tomorrows.