Christine Beverly

“We make up stories about the other person. In our minds we build these stories--she is this way, he is that way; look, she always do this, he always do that--and then these things keep us from seeing this person full as they are in the present moment.”
― Roland Merullo, The Delight of Being Ordinary: A Road Trip with the Pope and the Dalai Lama

“He was like one of those elderly gentlemen in Central Park who go around feeding birds and squirrels. Their pockets are filled with everything these small creatures may like to eat. The birds and the squirrels sense this and they perch on the shoulders of their benefactors and climb all over them in quest of what they consider their legitimate belongings.”
― Hendrik Willem van Loon, Van Loon's Lives

“In breathing, as in everything in life, the numbers are staggering – indeed fantastical. Every time you breathe, you exhale some 25 sextillion (that’s 2.5 × 1022) molecules of oxygen – so many that with a day’s breathing you will in all likelihood inhale at least one molecule from the breaths of every person who has ever lived.1 And every person who lives from now until the sun burns out will from time to time breathe in a bit of you. At the atomic level, we are in a sense eternal.”
― Bill Bryson, The Body: A Guide for Occupants

“Being: "...the world I knew held us in a kind of hypnosis: money, status, things, comfort, so-called security. Somehow we made a god of all that. We put all our talents and energies toward worshipping that god. With their questions, hints, speeches, with the the way they themselves lived, the Pope and the Dalai Lama kept warning us about the downside of that kind of worship. We half listened.”
― Merullo Roland