Eat, Pray, Love

No matter how hard you work, you cannot stop getting old."

happiness is a stroke of luck, something that will maybe descend upon you like fine weather if you're fortunate enough

Javanese colonists brought their Hindu caste system with them to Bali, though caste divisions were never as brutally enforced here as they once were in India. Still, the Balinese recognize a complex social hierarchy (there are five divisions of Brahmans alone

And then there was David.

couldn’t have picked me out of a police lineup. But I felt a glimmer of happiness when I started studying Italian, and when you sense a faint potentiality for happiness after such dark times you must grab onto the ankles of that happiness and not let go until it drags you face-first out of the dirt—this is not selfishness, but obligation. You were given life; it is your duty (and also your entitlement as a human being) to find something beautiful within life, no matter how slight.
I

a world of disorder and disaster and fraud, sometimes only beauty can be trusted.

(“He was powerful,” she says, “and I died of love in his shadow.”)

Bhagavad Gita—that ancient Indian Yogic text—says that it is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else’s life with perfection.

Giovanni smiles and says encouragingly, “Parla come magni.” He knows this is one of my favorite expressions in Roman dialect. It means, “Speak the way you eat,” or, in my personal translation: “Say it like you eat it.” It’s a reminder—when you’re making a big deal out of explaining something, when you’re searching for the right words—to keep your language as simple and direct as Roman food. Don’t make a big production out of it. Just lay it on the table.

“Do not apologize for crying. Without this emotion, we are only robots.”