The Fire Inside

I found out early that you can throw yourself away, missing what you’ve lost.

He realized that awakening is never the product of force but arises through a resting of the heart and an opening of the mind.

The story we are told of women is not this one. The story of women is the story of love, of foundering into another. A slight deviation: longing to founder and being unable to. Being left alone in the foundering, and taking things into one’s own hands: rat poison, the wheels of a Russian train. Even the smoother and gentler story is still just a mo

“Remember the Simone de Beauvoir quote,” she said, “ ‘You can’t have everything you want but you can want everything you want.’

Over time we may lose our clarity of self, because we are putting so much effort into “reading” other people’s reactions and ensuring that we don’t rock the boat, we may become less and less of an expert about our own thoughts, feelings, and wants.

She saw it as her unique contribution to the world to show each and every one of us that we were all psychic too, and that working with our own intuitive voice—as Katie Winterbourne helped me to do—was the first step to leading an ultimately fulfilling life.

I’d never met a woman like Pauline and had met her at a time when I feared not one woman like her existed in all the world. In some way I had never known how to express, I’d feared I would have to become the first of my kind, whatever my kind was, should I be allowed to survive—that which history has never seen before. Instead, here Pauline lived;