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“Some people use their own hurt as an excuse for hurting others”
― Roland Merullo, The Talk-Funny Girl

“I felt I was drawing close to that age, that place in life, where you realize one day what you'd told yourself was a Zen detachment turns out to be naked fear. You'd had one serious love relationship in your life and it had ended in tragedy, and the tragedy had broken something inside you. But instead of trying to repair the broken place, or at least really stop and look at it, you skated and joked. You had friends, you were a decent citizen. You hurt no one. And your life was somehow just about half of what it could be.”
― Roland Merullo, A Little Love Story

“If Christ's message could be distilled down to one line, that line would have to do with kindness and inclusiveness, not rules and divisiveness.”
― Roland Merullo, Breakfast with Buddha

“You ask a certain question again and again, in a sincere fashion, and the answer appears. But, in my experience, at least, that answer arrives according to it's own mysterious celestial timing, and often in disguise. And it comes in a way you're not prepared for, or don't want, or can't at first, accept.”
― Roland Merullo, Breakfast with Buddha

“Families are like countries. They have their own language and jokes and secrets and assumptions about the right and wrong ways of doing things, and some of that always shows in the children, the way something of
Germany or Australia always shows in a German or an Australian, no matter where they go. Outsiders like it or they don't, they feel at home there or they don't. It's like the taste of cilantro.

”
― Roland Merullo, A Little Love Story

“Isn't mockery the province of the insecure?”
― roland merullo, Breakfast with Buddha

“I have a tremendous fascination with the United States of America, the grand, swirling variousness of it, the way it siphons off the ambitious, the poor, and the abused from so many other nations, the ability we seem to have to be noble and heroic at the same time as we are being arrogant and stupid.”
― Roland Merullo, Breakfast with Buddha

“His eyes were more intense, the gaze more intimate. He put just the last inch or so of the fingers of both hands on the table to either side of his plate and said, “Love makes them run. That is not my lineage, my idea. That is a fact just like when water gets cold it ices. Like that. Some people cannot see this is a fact, but this is. They are blind in different ways but this is a fact: Love makes the atoms go where they go and stick where they stick. Everybody when they see a baby, a small boy or girl, they smile? Why? Because inside themself they know this fact. They know love made this baby, this boy, this girl. They feel this natural rising up of love in themself. Okay, yes? Before, I said to you about God’s music that is playing all the time, for everyone. God’s music is this love. And this love that runs our world, sometimes it means that there is help coming from that love, from that . . . source you would”
― Roland Merullo, Breakfast with Buddha

“You keep telling yourself it will be different. Year after year, time after time, you keep telling yourself things might change. It's what makes people go back to people they shouldn't ever go back to.”
― Roland Merullo

“if Christ’s message could be distilled down to one line, that line would have to do with kindness and inclusiveness, not rules and divisiveness.”
― Roland Merullo, Breakfast with Buddha

“You have to take a little time to appreciate being alive and breathing instead of wondering what you have to do next all the time. You have to stop and do nothing for a little while every day.”
― Roland Merullo, The Talk-Funny Girl

“Anger is like hands over your eyes when another person is trying to show you.”
― Roland Merullo, Breakfast with Buddha

“Inside the big world that you cannot control, you have the small world of you that you can control. In that small world, if you look, you can see whether to go this way toward good, or the other way toward bad.”
― Roland Merullo, Breakfast with Buddha

“We see our troubles through the filter of our own imperfection...”
― Roland Merullo, Golfing with God: A Novel of Heaven and Earth

“There was a small glass vase between us, three gladioli in a few ounces of water. One of the gladioli had dropped a petal- brushstroke of purple on fine white cloth. Rinpoche drank the last sip of his tea, then set the cup aside, took the petal with his thumb and second finger, placed it on the middle of the saucer in front of him, and turned the cup upside down to cover it.
"I feel a lesson coming on," I said...
"The flower is the good inside every person," he said. "The cup is like a wall, to protect. Many people have that wall."
"Armor" I said. He nodded.
"Why?"
"Because to live without the cup means you must feel the world as the world really is.”
― Roland Merullo, Breakfast with Buddha

“I thought I heard a cow mooing in Seese's back yard. Later on, later down the road, as they say, I would learn that this was the sound of the Rinpoche chanting some ancient prayer. But, at that moment, it sounded to me very much like a mooing cow.”
― Roland Merullo, Breakfast with Buddha

“When you are a crank, you put yourself on the top of the list of people you make miserable.”
― Roland Merullo, Breakfast with Buddha

“The frown again. So much contained there in the flex of a few muscles. All of history, it sometimes seemed to me. All of ours, at least.”
― Roland Merullo, Breakfast with Buddha

“I’m not great at talking to people. I have all these thoughts bunching up inside my head and then they come out like a dam bursting or something. I’m sorry.”
― Roland Merullo, The Talk-Funny Girl

“The past shouts at you, the ugly words or actions echo down across the years.”
― Roland Merullo, The Talk-Funny Girl

“our national obsession with sex (and if you don’t think there is a national obsession with sex, just browse the magazine racks in the local chain bookstore) is really nothing more than a profound spiritual longing in disguise: the desire to exhaust all other desires and feel loved and sated, at peace with our fragmented modern selves, linked to those around us. At peace, at rest. I wonder, sometimes, if the same deep desire lies at the heart of addiction to drugs, to drink, to eating, to work: are we all just desperately looking for some strategy that will get us past the shoals of modern existence and safely into that imagined, calm port?”
― Roland Merullo, Breakfast with Buddha

“There are teachers who say that one of the main obstacles, spiritual obstacles, for westerners is a sense of unworthiness, a self-limiting sense of what’s possible for them in a human life.”
― Roland Merullo, Dinner with Buddha: A Novel

“All that we are is the result of what we have thought: It is built on our thoughts, it is made from our thoughts. If a man speaks or acts with evil thought, pain follows him, just like the wheel follows the foot of the ox that draws the cart. If a person speaks or acts with pure thought, happiness follows him, like a shadow that never leaves...”
― Roland Merullo, Breakfast with Buddha

“When you have known someone your whole life you don’t need a lot of warm-up time to get into a big argument. All the fore-play has been done years ago, and so the battle sits in your memory like stove gas awaiting the match. A wrong word, a careless allusion, and the old fire is suddenly raging.”
― Roland Merullo, Breakfast with Buddha

“Some people use their own hurt as an excuse for hurting others, or for soaking in self-pity, or for a sharp anger that knifes up through the surface whenever something reminds them of what happened long ago.”
― Roland Merullo, The Talk-Funny Girl

“What difference makes what you believe? What happens will happen anyway, exactly the same, no matter what you believe. What you do makes the important part. What you do”
― Roland Merullo, Breakfast with Buddha

“A fair portion of my anger had returned, but alongside it ran the memory of those few seconds on the yoga mat in the death pose. I felt as if I had been shown a kind of essential secret, something so subtle and quiet and small(and yet so important)that I could gone my entire adult life and never even imagined such a thing existed.”
― Roland Merullo, Breakfast with Buddha

“My father he always say that the oil is already inside the student, already there from all time. The teacher only has a match and makes it light, and then the student isn’t a student anymore, just a friend, going the same way down the dark road but seeing now by himself.”
― Roland Merullo, Lunch with Buddha

“...it was like being in the start of an earthquake. Before that, whatever else happened, however bad things had been, you were at least sure the ground would stay still.”
― Roland Merullo, The Talk-Funny Girl

“I decided that if I was worth anything as a person, I ought to be able to let her be with what it was she had to be with then: not urge her to fight it if she was tired of fighting, not ply her with hope, not make her think about who might be upset or worried, not ask anything of her, nothing, just be alive with her while she was still alive.”
― Roland Merullo, A Little Love Story