I also had a dim idea that if I walked the streets of New York by myself all night something of the city's mystery and magnificence might rub off on me at last. But I gave it up.

because wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.

There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends.

I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, "This is what it is to be happy.

I wanted to crawl in between those black lines of print, the way you crawl through a fence, and go to sleep under that beautiful big green fig-tree.

I felt very still and empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.

My mother said the cure for thinking too much about yourself was helping somebody who was worse off than you.

I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow.

There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room.

I began to think vodka was my drink at last. It didn’t taste like anything, but it went straight down into my stomach like a sword swallowers’ sword and made me feel powerful and godlike.

I may have made a straight A in physics, but I was panic-struck. Physics made me sick the whole time I learned it.

The word “inevitable” is fearful to the ego, but joyous to the spirit. God is inevitable, and you cannot avoid Him any more than He can avoid you.

Every social justice movement that I know of has come out of people sitting in small groups, telling their life stories, and discovering that other people have shared similar experiences.

In this light, my spirit saw through all things and into all creatures and I recognized God in grass and plants.

In truth we know by experience that song has great force and vigour to move and inflame the hearts of men to invoke and praise God with a more vehement and ardent zeal.

Since the day man first tried to conquer space, the earth has been mobilizing.

A bureaucrat's idea of cleaning up his files is to make a copy of every paper before he destroys it.

I had Elvis' number in my book and I never called it.

You know, when I hear music, I just hear the whole thing.

There is not one piece of cosmic dust that is outside the scope of God's sovereign providence.

The necessity of war, which among human actions is the most lawless, hath some kind of affinity with the necessity of law.