“Imagine that you are dying. If you had a terminal disease would you ­finish this book? Why not? The thing that annoys this 10-weeks-to-live self is the thing that is wrong with the book. So change it. Stop arguing with yourself. Change it. See? Easy. And no one had to die.”

“We all know that there is a reward for every labour as well as there is a reward for every game played and won. How committed you are in life determines your reward.”

“If you can survive and won the battle over other millions of semen deposited alongside with you in your mothers womb, tell me why you cannot win the battle over challenges, difficulties and poverty? Friend, I know you will succeed because; you’d once done it in the womb.”

“When I harvest my life right up to the edges, I have collected every last kernel of blessing.”

“Scarcity mentality measures out life by the ounce; it always concludes that the needs outweigh the resources.”

“What if our common sense has been negatively influenced by our addiction to comfort?”

“SENSEDo you make decisions based on what makes sense in your mind or what you sense in your heart?”

“In times of crisis, we must all decide again and again whom we love.”

“We suddenly feel fearful and apprehensive, naked in our perishable flesh, and for just a moment we wish we could go back to being stone—crumbling in death rather than rotting, trapped inside an immobile prison of stone rather than reduced to immaterial souls like those that now rattled within our skulls. The moment passes. There is no point in regretting irreversible decisions—one has to live with them, and we try.”

“What can we do in any hardship? We can hope with prayerful praise.”

“The past is a novel, written by Fate, weaving the same themes: love and its glory, hate and its prisoners, the soul and its price. Our decisions become narratives: fated choices that unknowably change the course of the living river. In the present, where decisions and connections are made, Fate waits on the riverbank of Story, leaving us to our mistakes and miracles, because it’s our will alone that leads us to one or the other.”

“This is how life works. Deciding whom to love is not an alien form of decision-making, a romantic interlude in the midst of normal life. Instead, decisions about whom to love are more intense versions of the sorts of decisions we make throughout the course of our existence, from what kind of gelato to order to what career to pursue. Living is an inherently emotional business.”

“Your little choices become habits that affect the bigger decisions you make in life.”

“Don’t let your emotions get in the way of rational decision making.”

“Every game is winnable if you change your mind about what the prize should be and your perspective about the players at the table.”