Proust's tea cake has nothing on one hour in a college dorm.
For inside all the weakness of old age, the spirit, God knows, is as mercurial as it ever was.
Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace.
I think of the trees and how simply they let go, let fall the riches of a season, how without grief (it seems) they can let go and go deep into their roots for renewal and sleep. . . . Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember that nothing stays the same for long, not even pain, psychic pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let it go.
Without darkness, nothing comes to birth, As without light, nothing flowers.
I always forget how important the empty days are, how important it may be sometimes not to expect to produce anything, even a few lines in a journal. A day when one has not pushed oneself to the limit seems a damaged damaging day, a sinful day. Not so! The most valuable thing one can do for the psyche, occasionally, is to let it rest, wander, live in the changing light of a room.
We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be.
I lived in San Francisco for about eight years and I did a lot of improvisation there. The improvisational world ruled the voice world in San Francisco, so I became a voice talent there and did a lot of commercials and worked all the time. But I never could break into animation.
It isn't enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And it isn't enough to believe in it. One must work at it.
Simplicity of life, even the barest, is not a misery, but the very foundation of refinement; a sanded floor and whitewashed walls and the green trees, and flowery meads, and living waters outside; or a grimy palace amid the same with a regiment of housemaids always working to smear the dirt together so that it may be unnoticed; which, think you, is the most refined, the most fit for a gentleman of those two dwellings?
All movies in China are censored. Out of 600 movies produced in China, only 60 are allowed to show in theatres.