“Living in a bittersweet state, with an intense awareness of life's fragility and the pain of separation, is an underappreciated strength and an unexpected path to wisdom, joy, and especially communion.”

“The very highest states—of awe and joy, wonder and love, meaning and creativity—emerge from this bittersweet nature of reality. We experience them not because life is perfect—but because it's not.”

“From the moment of my birth, I lived with pain at the center of my life. My only purpose in life was to find a way to coexist with intense pain.”

“An awareness of death encourages us to live more intensely.”

“In fact, you could say that what orients a person to the bittersweet is a heightened awareness of finality.”

“We have become accustomed to living our life with joy amidst pain and challenges”

“All the communions of a life-time are one communion.
All the communions of all men now living are one communion.
All the communions of all men, present, past and future, are one communion.”

“The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware. In this state of god-like awareness one sings; in this realm the world exists as poem.”

“The life where nothing was ever unexpected. Or inconvenient. Or unusual. The life without colour, pain or past.”

“Now, these men weren’t idiots. They were geniuses who paid a high price for their genius because the rest of their thinking was other-world. A genius is someone who travels to truth by an unexpected path. Unfortunately, unexpected paths lead to disaster in everyday life.”