Christmas and Easter can be subjects for poetry, but Good Friday, like Auschwitz, cannot. The reality is so horrible it is not surprising that people should have found it a stumbling block to faith.

Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.

Water is the soul of the Earth.

We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for I don't know.

We would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the moment and let our illusions die.

Civilizations should be measured by the degree of diversity attained and the degree of unity retained.

Herds of reindeer move across Miles and miles of golden moss

All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation.

'Healing,' Papa would tell me, 'is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.'

Few people take an interest in Iceland, but in those few the interest is passionate.

No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.

Yes, I'm shallow, I don't mind admitting it. Perhaps I should admit that there's no end to the depths of my shallowness.

Knowledge is realizing that the street is one way; wisdom is looking in both directions anyway.

I have been amongst the best players in the world for 8 years. None at that level played as many ties as I did.

I'm not sure about life after this; god knows I'm not a spiritual man.

We're all subjective beings and trapped in our own realities and our own biographical stories and physical bodies and our histories - and that's the only way we can experience the world.

I really want to understand the mind so I can be more comfortable with the way people are. Being comfortable with people is incredibly important.

Appalling is the soul of a man! Better might one be pushed off into the material spaces beyond the uttermost orbit of our sun, than once feel himself fairly afloat in himself.

A half-century before Madonna, Gypsy [Rose Lee] understood how to make performance out of desire, how to exploit the very human and eternal instinct to always want most what we'll never have.

I don't do the super-clean-living L.A. thing.

Whatever begins, also ends.