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"The depth and complexity of the questions we've recently been engaging tend to ignite associated questions very quickly. The family members of these subjects-purpose, responsibility, devotion, commitment, trust, yearning-and their neighbors-frustration, jealousy, ambition, sloth, etc.-get all excited and have things to say to each other. Because of the pressure and tension between them, one has to negotiate the dialogue carefully and use a lot of patience, tolerance and other unsexy qualities. Otherwise, we've got another war on our hands."
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"Sometimes we're so concerned about giving our children what we never had growing up, we neglect to give them what we did have growing up."

"Mothers care in volumes of tears and earnestness of prayers and a depth of emotion others cannot fathom."

"He who loses his mother loses a pure soul who blesses and guards him constantly."

"Accuracy is the twin brother of honesty; inaccuracy, of dishonesty."

"So that is marriage, Lily thought, a man and a woman looking at a girl throwing a ball."

"One of the strongest loves I've ever witnessed is the love a mother has for her child."

"Avoid providing material for the drama that is always stretched tight between parents and children; it uses up much of the children's strength and wastes the love of the elders, which acts and warms even if it doesn't comprehend. Don't ask for advice from them and don't expect any understanding; but believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is strength and blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it."

"All happy families are alike, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
Explore more quotes by Darrell Calkins

"My take on personal evolution is largely about the spirit of connecting and disconnecting things, relating to what I call "the gap or time and space between things. It is also about becoming practical in all this, developing the power and precision to simply bring the grand ideas home, to compress the paradigm of perception/choice/action/result into a single gesture."

"Transformation, on the other hand, is creating beauty from horror or destruction (or, for beginners, an actually pleasant evening with the usual family problems)."

"One of the great images to come down to us through Zen Buddhism is the encounter between an enlightened master and an advanced apprentice during the course of a shared meal. The apprentice, becoming fed up with the stress and waiting and the master's apparent disregard for him, demands an explanation without complication of exactly how to become enlightened. The master asks, "Have you finished your rice? "Yes, says the apprentice. "Then go wash your bowl."

"Well-being, or wholeness, implies integrity and harmony between all existing elements, providing freedom for the whole."

"Whether or not we personally do impact some ultimate evolution beyond ourselves, we can definitely influence what happens today. To choose to waste a day, or a lifetime, is opposed to the essential spirit of life, expressed, sacrificed for, and upheld through every perceivable interaction in nature. It's also opposed to every human expression of spirit throughout history. We know to live up to our potential, to fulfill the trust of creation by moving forward, even if we don't believe it or feel like it or know why."

"In the quest for a functional and direct interaction between imagination and reality, and the evolution of them both, there is in place a natural resistance, which I have referred to as Creative Resistance, because it demands just that: creativity. Much of this calls for redefining, or refining, one's relationship with time, and all the qualities and skills that will only come from engaging time more creatively and effectively. As such, part of the bargain is about acquiescing to a rhythm that is subtler and has more definite purpose to it than one's subjective preferences."

"Forgiveness is really about absolution: to set free. But if you look carefully at the dynamic, the one you're setting free is yourself."

"Like everyone on the planet, one identifies and looks toward a vision of improvement or refinement, but/and one has to find a way to engage both of those-what is so, and what can be-with an appropriate harmony that is itself the hallmark of wholeness. In essence, we are looking to create a harmony between the existing elements, not a more severe dichotomy between what we want and what we should be doing."

"My intention is not to define a perfect life and then cause an unhappy analysis of what you are not doing correctly or are incapable of doing."

"We do have some capacity to determine how things evolve, and how we evolve, individually and as a community or race. That's a tremendous freedom and a tremendous responsibility."
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