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.

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.”

She shrugs: “Magari.”
Another untranslatable bit of Italian slang, meaning something between “hopefully” and “in your dreams, sucker.”

“So sadness is a place?” Giovanni asked.
“Sometimes people live there for years,” I said.

Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human experience. But never again use another person’s body or emotions as a scratching post for your own unfulfilled yearnings.