It was not all romantic. I did not have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for 5 cents, to buy food and go for 7 miles across town every Sunday night, once a week to eat normally at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of, from what I’ve come across, following my curiosity and intuition, turned out to be priceless later.
— For years I pretended to love the poor, the afflicted. I had pity for them, but I never loved them. They disgusted me.
— They are hard to love. The poor disgust us because they are us, shorn of our illusions. They show us what we'd look like without our fine clothes. How we'd smell without perfume.
And one must learn to be rich. To be poor anyone can manage.
As poor as we are, love is one thing I can afford.
Rich people have small TVs and big libraries, and poor people have small libraries and big TVs.