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"It's not as if we're running a hospital for sick children down here, let's put it that way. Where's the nobility in patching up a bunch of old tables and chairs? Corrosive to the soul, quite possibly. I've seen too many estates not to know that. Idolatry! Caring too much for objects can destroy you. Only-if you care for a thing enough, it takes on a life of its own, doesn't it? And isn't the whole point of things-beautiful things-that they connect you to some larger beauty? Those first images that crack your heart wide open and you spend the rest of your life chasing, or trying to recapture, in one way or another?"
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"Anything you assume ownership of, it will strike back at you. Ultimately, even at the time of death, whomever you've had excessive intent of ownership, it will all become painful."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Sweet pea, you are my favorite hello and my hardest goodbye, and I don't want to go a day without you. Consider that your official invitation."
Author Name
Personal Development

"If attachment becomes fixed on a 'Gnani' [The enlightened one], then it becomes Real attachment (prashastaraag). It will get one's work done. It will uproot attachment in all other places. Because the Gnani is Vitarag, attachment-free. Attachment for a Vitarag gives liberation from all the suffering."
Author Name
Personal Development

"If a person were to get stuck in attachment induced entrancement for any worldly thing for just one hour, then it will last for a hundred years! Because of pleasure resulting effects and intents of engrossment, an indulging bad habit will last one day of Brahma (many many years), therefore it is not worth focusing our awareness anywhere (other than our true self, pure soul)."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Wherever there is ownership, there is upadhi (externally induced problems)."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Attachment to the external always suffocates inner peace."
Author Name
Personal Development

"It's not as if we're running a hospital for sick children down here, let's put it that way. Where's the nobility in patching up a bunch of old tables and chairs? Corrosive to the soul, quite possibly. I've seen too many estates not to know that. Idolatry! Caring too much for objects can destroy you. Only-if you care for a thing enough, it takes on a life of its own, doesn't it? And isn't the whole point of things-beautiful things-that they connect you to some larger beauty? Those first images that crack your heart wide open and you spend the rest of your life chasing, or trying to recapture, in one way or another?"
Author Name
Personal Development

"Of course, the self-righteous demand and expectation for love, and exactly how it should be expressed, is not the most streamlined method for producing it in another for you. That is, it does not compel or create the love itself. You're neither loving nor producing that which would compel the love toward you. You're compressed between them both and incapable of accepting either. And rightly so. Which then accelerates the accumulating suffering."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Why be seduced by something as small as a front door in another country? Why fall in love with a place because it has trams and its people seldom have curtains in their homes? However absurd the intense reactions provoked by such small (and mute) foreign elements may seem, the pattern is at least familiar from our personal lives. There, too, we may find ourselves anchoring emotions of love on the way a person butters his or her bread, or recoiling at his or her taste in shoes. To condemn ourselves for these minute concerns is to ignore how rich in meaning details may be."
Author Name
Personal Development

"He leaned against her, pressing his shoulder into hers. "Don't be mad at me," he said, sighing. "It makes me crazy.""I'm never mad at you," she said."Right.""I'm not.""You must just be mad near me a lot."
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Personal Development
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"Character, to me, is the life's blood of fiction."
Life


"The Little Friend is a long book. It's also completely different from my first novel: different landscape, different characters, different use of language and diction, different approach to story."
Friendship


"But it's for every writer to decide his own pace, and the pace varies with the writer and the work."
Work


"I'm not sure whay I've been drawn to this subject, except that murder is a subject that has always drawn people for as long as people have been telling stories."
People


"I believe, in a funny way, the job of the novelist is to be out there on the fringes and speaking for an experience that has not really been spoken for."
Experience


"It's a long story. I'll make it short as I can."
Brevity


"Who knew, or cared, the names of the Turks who blew the roof off the Parthenon? the mullahs who had ordered the destruction of the Buddhas at Bamiyan? Yet living or dead: their acts stood. It was the worst kind of immortality. Intentionally or no: I had extinguished a light at the heart of the world."
Destruction


"It's hard for me to show work while I'm writing, because other people's comments will influence what happens."
Work


"So I'm not a Southern writer in the commonly held sense of the term, like Faulkner or Eudora Welty, who took the South for their entire literary environment and subject matter."
Environment


"It seems to me that psychology is only another word for what the ancients called fate."
Fate
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