There's definitely an intense anger that I have inside, and I don't know where it came from. I've had it all my life. My mom was always like, 'You're going to end up in jail with that temper!'

My own approach has always been to push intense emotions down and attempt to deal with them later. When I was younger, I was terrified to express anger because it would often kick-start a horrible reaction in the men in my life.

Holding on to anger, resentment and hurt only gives you tense muscles, a headache and a sore jaw from clenching your teeth. Forgiveness gives you back the laughter and the lightness in your life.

It's very intense to be in front of a live audience. It's just an amazing experience. It's dangerous. Everything out there is heightened. The bad stuff is extra-worse. The silences are extra-silent. The good stuff is amazing. It's electric when you walk out there. For 90 minutes, you're on this other planet.

Each woman has potential access to Rio Abajo Rio, this river beneath the river. She arrives there through deep meditation, dance, writing, painting, prayermaking, singing, drumming, active imagination, or any activity which requires an intense altered consciousness. A woman arrives in this world-between-worlds through yearning and by seeking something she can see just out of the corner of her eye. She arrives there by deeply creative acts, through intentional solitude, and by practice of any of the arts.

I think no more than a week after I started writing I ran into the first block. It's hard to describe it in a way that will be understandable to anyone who is not a neurotic. I will try. All my life I have been haunted by the obsession that to desire a thing or to love a thing intensely is to place yourself in a vulnerable position, to be a possible, if not a probable, loser of what you most want. Let's leave it like that. That block has always been there and always will be, and my chance of getting, or achieving, anything that I long for will always be gravely reduced by the interminable existence of that block.

A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.

A writer - and, I believe, generally all persons - must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.

Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.

You have stopped living the Life that you are meant to live when you attach too much importance to what the world thinks of you. And unwittingly, along the way, you have given the world the right to make you, well, intensely unhappy!

The beauty of Life is that everyone goes through their own unique, personal, process of evolution - shaped by time, their lived experiences and the manner in which they internalize learnings from these experiences. Spirituality then is an intensely personal, private, awakening process. Although the truth is one, no one size fits all. And there is no right or wrong way. All roads are headed in the same direction though.

Happiness is a decision you make. It is an intensely personal choice. It often stems from a feeling of being unsettled?something's not right?explore deeper and you will find that you are unhappy?dig deeper and you will go to the source of that unhappiness?then you invest yourself in that decision to weed out, even pluck out, that source of unhappiness?that's how you decide to be happy?it is a process of making a Life-altering decision?!

It takes Intense Friction for a Nothing-Special Piece of Carbon to be the Diamond that Shines from Within.

Behind every broken curse, there is an intense emotion. Yes, it's always love.

He's as tense as I am, maybe even more so, but it's so hard to reconcile that with the serenity of weightlessness. His faux-blond hair is floating out away from his head. He's wearing a worn, much-mended, and too-large shirt his friend in town must've found for him to help him blend in. He looks nothing like the Romeo who dragged me off the base, nothing like the Cormac who threw himself between his own people and me. It's like that guy's gone, and I killed him.

To conquer frustration, one must remain intensely focused on the outcome, not the obstacles.

Pursuing an escapist mode of living where we chase the false pretense of constant enjoyment will only further drive us into a state of distress.

This kind of search in the dark, with its tense desire, lasting for years, full of foreboding, with it's exhausting change form aspiration to frustration and it's final breakthrough to lucidity, all of this you only know properly if you experienced it.

The secret to being successful in any field is getting very interested in it... I could force myself to be fairly good in a lot of things, but I couldn't excel in anything in which I didn't have an intense interest

Writing is.... being able to take something whole and fiercely alive that exists inside you in some unknowable combination of thought, feeling, physicality, and spirit, and to then store it like a genie in tense, tiny black symbols on a calm white page. If the wrong reader comes across the words, they will remain just words. But for the right readers, your vision blooms off the page and is absorbed into their minds like smoke, where it will re-form, whole and alive, fully adapted to its new environment.

We are told that talent creates its own opportunities. But it sometimes seems that intense desire creates not only its own opportunities but its own talents.

"The kind of poem I produced in those days was hardly anything more than a sign I made of being alive, of passing or having passed, or hoping to pass, through certain intense human emotions. It was a phenomenon of orientation rather than of art, thus comparable to stripes of paint on a roadside rock or to a pillared heap of stones marking a mountain trail.

"I have said that in one respect my mind has changed during the last twenty or thirty years. Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds, such as the works of Milton, Gray, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, gave me great pleasure, and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare, especially in the historical plays. I have also said that formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music very great delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also almost lost my taste for pictures or music. Music generally sets me thinking too energetically on what I have been at work on, instead of giving me pleasure. I retain some taste for fine scenery, but it does not cause me the exquisite delight which it formerly did. On the other hand, novels which are works of the imagination, though not of a very high order, have been for years a wonderful relief and pleasure to me, and I often bless all novelists. A surprising number have been read aloud to me, and I like all if moderately good, and if they do not end unhappily?against which a law ought to be passed. A novel, according to my taste, does not come into the first class unless it contains some person whom one can thoroughly love, and if a pretty woman all the better.

The only thing more dangerous than ignorance is the pretense of intelligent ignorance. The former is teachable; the latter is not.