The height of the mountaintop is measured by the drab drudgery of the valley.
Now I was a tiger that neither pounced nor lay waiting between the trees. I became an unseen spirit.
Can you imagine how it is, to want to be neither inside nor outside, to want to be nowhere and disappear?
With hope, a mind is always free.
Love is tricky. It is never mundane or daily. You can never get used to it. You have to walk with it, then let it walk with you. You can never balk. It moves you like the tide. It takes you out to sea, then lays you on the beach again. Today's struggling pain is the foundation for a certain stride through the heavens. You can run from it but you can never say no. It includes everyone.
He asked if he could recite a poem he had written that morning: 'You speak,' he said, 'the language of shooting stars, more surprising than sunrise, more brilliant than the sun, as brief as sunset. I want to follow its trail to eternity.
My mother didn't teach me lessons about being Chinese as strongly as she did the notion of who I was as a female.
Pulse as an active means of expression, Stravinsky and Beethoven are the two masters of that.
I do heavy weights in the morning for about an hour, and then I do 45 minutes of higher-volume lifting in the afternoon. My least favorite is the legs. . . I do quite a few chin-ups and rows. I do mostly old-school lifting with a lot of squats.
The possibility of transformation is the essence of hope.
America has spent too long interfering oversees in too many other people's wars, and too much other stuff.