Magical places are always beautiful and deserve to be contemplated ... Always stay on the bridge between the invisible and the visible.

The implication of this particular tale is: Trust strangers. Believe in magic.

The only trust required is to know that when there is one ending there will be another beginning.

The whole thing becomes like this evil enchantment from a fairy tale, but you're made to believe the spell can never be broken.

A fairy tale...on the other hand, demands of the reader total surrender; so long as he is in its world, there must be for him no other.

Unrelenting confidence was necessary.

The challenge is to write about real things magically.

The place of true healing is a fierce place. It's a giant place. it's a place of monstrous beauty and endless dark and glimmering light.

At critical moments in the life of individuals and of societies, it is not necessarily the facts that are needed as much as a profound narrative that makes sense of life’s conflicts and misunderstandings. When all seems to be falling apart and becoming less rational and more chaotic, it is usually a different story that is needed to make things whole again. Mythic imagination can break the spell of time and open us to a level of life that remains timeless. Myth is not about what happened in past times; myth is about what happens to people all of the time.

In the real world, something is happening and no one knows what is going to happen. In the image-world, it has happened, and it will forever happen in that way.

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being. And we are now men, and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny; and not minors and invalids in a protected corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides, redeemers, and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort, and advancing on Chaos and the Dark.

Truth is a matter of the imagination.

The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.

Seeing the life force in human beings brings medicine [and education and healing] closer to gardening than to carpentry. I don't fix a rosebush. A rosebush is a living process, and as a student of that process, I can learn to prune, to nurture and cooperate with it in ways that allow it best to 'happen,' to maximize the life force in it even in the presence of disease [and difficulty and pain]. Simply trusting process has a great power.

A colleague of mine was telling me about the birth of her grandchild. At one point in a long and difficult labor, her daughter had called out to her for help. My colleague experienced this as a moment of impotence, feeling that there was nothing that she could do to fix things. She had sat there holding her child's hand, trusting the process of birth and feeling that this was not enough. But perhaps it is. The trust of process that comes from personal knowledge and experience is really the foundation of helping and comforting one another. Without it all of our actions are driven by fear. Fear is the friction in all transitions.