“There is a Carot's law to pain. It is measured not by absolutes, but the difference between source and ambience, and my ambience had been too safe and too pleasurable for too long to equip me for this.”

“In times of pain, when the future is too terrifying to contemplate and the past too painful to remember, I have learned to pay attention to right now. The precise moment I was in was always the only safe place for me.”

“I too was ill prepared for the West. The only difference between my relatives and me is that I opened my mind.”

“Living systems are units of interactions; they exist in an ambience. From a purely biological point of view they cannot be understood independently of that part of the ambience with which they interact: the niche; nor can the niche be defined independently of the living system that specifies it.”

“A self-willed man obeys a different law, the one law I, too, hold absolutely sacred — the human law in himself, his own individual will.”

“Stoicism will teach you to smile at pain and frown at the sight of too much pleasure.”

“...The sublime feeling is not mere pleasure as taste is – it is a mixture of pleasure and pain... Confronted with objects that are too big according to their magnitude or too violent according to their power, the mind experiences its own limitations.”

“I had wanted to say that my song was far too painful to sing.”

“How strange too and unfamiliar to think that one had been loved, that one's presence had once had the power to make a difference between happiness and dullness in another's day.”

“She had always liked this image of herself as too much trouble, as different, and she sometimes thought of it as a carapace that kept her safe.”