Christine Beverly

“Is there any greater pleasure in this world than to sit around a table with people you really like, with whom you are tuned in on the same emotional and spiritual wave length, so that there never is any static, and with whom you agree so fully upon all matters of real significance that you can disagree just as heartily upon the nonessentials? We have by far too little of that sort of thing in America. We seem to feel that we should always be doing something. Just to sit and talk or, even worse, just to sit and do nothing at all, not even talk, is held to be a waste of time. How can one waste something that does not really exist, I never have been able to understand, but I do think that it would be of the greatest benefit to us as a nation if we could learn to spend at least half an hour after every meal sitting quietly around the dinner table.”
― Hendrik Willem van Loon, Van Loon's Lives

“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

“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

“(G)aiety and kindness and tolerance and understanding were the gifts he bestowed upon the world. Wherever he went, he squandered these rare possessions in a most magnificent and bountiful manner, for he knew (what all wise people have realized since the beginning of time) that the only treasures which are truly ours are those we lay up in the hearts of our friends.”
― Hendrik Willem van Loon, Van Loon's Lives