“Gifts are meant to be wrapped. Honestly, it’s basic etiquette.”

Even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise.

Darkness watches me from every angle. My only friend. From its own place within the silence, it speaks to me in a strange way.

I never claimed to be a predator, but right now she’s certainly the prey.

He was unhinged. Shameless. Everything wrong and everything right. And he held the key to my cage in his palm.

I may be unhinged, but I’m constantly working to channel my urges. It never stops, the self-restraint, the need for more.

It’s just a question. A question whose answer no longer has the power to hurt me.

Maybe I’ve dragged myself through the mud since then, but even mud hardens beneath your shoes. I must be standing on a mountain of it by now. And no one can touch me from way the hell up here.

Heartache is my constant companion, and we’re perfect for one another. Two co-dependent peas in a pod. My past and my future.

Hatred’s the fuel that keeps me alive.

I quickly learned I needed someone who specifically enjoyed, or at the very least could take it, when I hit that point of blinding release. Every time, I lost all sense of the control I work so hard at maintaining.

We have no use for people who don’t want to be here.

Doesn’t he know I want everything? And in return, I’ll give him all of me.

Crawl inside this body, find me where I am most ruined— love me there.

Like I’m a puzzle to be worked out and he’s got all damn day.

Maybe she’d try to understand that the dark images muddled my brain until it hurt, until I had no choice but to let them out.

All the hardest, coldest people you meet were once as soft as water. And that’s the tragedy of living.

Maybe it’s time we got back to the basics of love.

Compassion opposes this order and is therefore best thought of as being in some way supernatural.

The basic premise of religion– that if you live a good life, things will go well for you– is wrong. Jesus was the most morally upright person who ever lived, yet He had a life filled with the experience of poverty, rejection, injustice, and even torture.

In this situation, it becomes vital that our own country orient its policies in consonance with this basic evolutionary condition rather than pursue a course blind to the reality that the colonial era is now past and the Asian peoples covet the right to shape their own free destiny.

The Way is basically perfect. It doesn’t require perfecting. The Way has no form or sound. It’s subtle and hard to perceive. It’s like when you drink water: you know how hot or cold it is, but you can’t tell others.

Part of our struggle is to make the international community understand that we are a poor country not because there is an insufficiency of resources and investment, but because we are deprived of the basic institutions and practices that make for good government.

The four basic ingredients for success are: you must have the will to want something; you must have the right kind of attitude.

The basic work of health professionals in general, and of psychotherapist s in particular, is to become full human beings and to inspire full human-beingness in other people who feel starved about their lives.