Do you know why I left America, Lidewij? So that I would never again have to encounter Americans." "But you are an American." "Incurably so, it seems.

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.

We scarcely know how much of our pleasure and interest in life comes to us through our eyes until we have to do without them

Gold is found in the deep rough soil, so go for gold

An empty man is full of himself.

The thicker one gets with some people the thinner they become.

God appoints people who do disappoint - to point to a God who never disappoints.

There's still a feeling that uncensored emotions make a good song. They don't. Pure emotion is just somebody screaming at you, or crying. It doesn't communicate anything.

Left to himself, man is half beast and half devil.

This is not the first time that Mexican authorities have handed over an Arab from a country with known Al Qaeda connections to a local sheriff across the border. FBI picks them up and disappears

Most Beethoven symphonies require 80 or more instruments, and the late romantics even more.

My children, if you desire perseverance, be devout to our Blessed Lady.