“People give pain, are callous and insensitive, empty and cruel… but place heals the hurt, soothes the outrage, fills the terrible vacuum that these human beings make.”

“As human beings, we have a natural compulsion to fill empty spaces.”

“Heal the world, make it a better place,
For you and for me and the entire human race,
There are people dying, but if you care enough for the living,
Make a better place for you and for me.”

“Human beings cannot endure emptiness and desolation; they will fill the vacuum by creating a new focus of meaning. The idols of fundamentalism are not good substitutes for God; if we are to create a vibrant new faith for the twenty-first century, we should, perhaps, ponder the history of God for some lessons and warnings.”

“Jace knew he was being cruel, and he barely cared. Hurting people he loved was almost as good as hurting himself when he was in this kind of mood.”

“The healing of the collective human consciousness is dependent upon us creating a society where we can make room for pain. You currently live in a world that has made only positive things, like positive emotions and success and being healed, acceptable. This is a world that sees anything less than this as a failure. This prevents people from healing. It prevents people from admitting to where they are and taking the sometimes counterintuitive steps they need to take in order to heal. It is ok to not be ok.”

“Healing hurts. But what hurts more is the refusal of the call. The true pain of living is the abandonment of self, the mind-body split that makes us fear life. Our ache may be heavy and our souls tired today, but resistance makes it all feel a thousand times worse. Rejection of where we are amplifies suffering. Until we cannot take it anymore. Until there is no way out but in. Diving into the blackness, we discover not death but more abundant life. This is the great paradox of healing, which all great artists and poets and seers have known. We die into our trauma and discover our courage. The fiercest warriors are the ones who have let life break and remake them a thousand times over. The gods of healing are calling through your pain today. Healing hurts, yes, but the hurt itself may eventually heal you.”

“A hurt body and mind aren't just like a dictatorship; they are a dictatorship. There is no tyrant as merciless as pain, no despot so cruel as confusion.”

“I just thought I was empty and now I'm being filled… and I just wanted to keep being filled.”

“Blessed is the almost insensitive tree,
more blessed is the hard stone that doesn't feel,
for no pain is greater than the pain of being alive,
and no sorrow more intense than conscious life.”