All good American literature is always interested in people who are ambiguously heroic, like Gatsby.

Some tourists think Amsterdam is a city of sin, but in truth it is a city of freedom. And in freedom, most people find sin.

Amsterdam is like the rings of a tree: It gets older as you get closer to the center.

I feel like crying, so I must be crying, but it's impossible to tell because I'm underwater.

...And in freedom, most people find sin.

So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was a hurricane.

A taste so profound and complex that it can't even be compared to other tastes, only to emotions. Cheesy waffles, I was thinking, tastes like love without the fear of love's dissolution.

My thoughts are stars I cannot fathom into constellations.

The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive.

All those paper people living in their paper houses, burning the future to stay warm.

I would always love Alaska Young, my crooked neighbor, with all my crooked heart.

I swear I won't touch you even with a finger until you ask me yourself.

The age of the pulp magazine was the last in which youngsters, to get their primitive material, were forced to be literate.

Love is moral even without legal marriage but marriage is immoral without love.

There is no division nor subtraction in the heart-arithmetic of a good mother. There are only addition and multiplication.

"Drink with me, my dear," said Mr. Weller. "Put your lips to this here tumbler, and then I can kiss you by deputy."

My goal is to help women learn to walk out their lives with real faith in a real Jesus who changes real lives forever.

I think it's really hard to work in a city where you live too, because I get so absorbed with the movie that I become a bad friend and a bad participant in my own life.

I wish I could escape into some alter-ego, just so I could feel more comfortable onstage.

Once you squeeze toothpaste out, you can't put it back into the tube. The same is true with our words. Once we say something hurtful, we can't take it back

My kid wants to be a prison warden when he grows up so he can put thumb tacks on the electric chairs.