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

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 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.

I buried my head under the darkness of the pillow and pretended it was night. I couldn't see the point of getting up. I had nothing to look forward to.

Indoctrination is dangerous.

You can spread jelly on the peanut butter but you can't spread peanut butter on the jelly.

Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears.

She couldn’t help but wonder at the events of recent days, and at how—even in the face of such misfortune, there was so much good,

Once we understand how they think, we can predict their behaviour. And once we predict it well, we can manipulate it. That is diplomacy.

The union Christ had with the Father was the greatest that we can conceive of in this life-if indeed we can conceive of it.

It's true that the question of Iraq divided Europe.

I think I'm a bit in love with these girls. They make me feel giddy. Like I haven't a care in the world. Like I'm fearless. Like I used to be.

But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.

In those moments when I'm obsessively counting my sins against me, it is good news to remember that God has counted my sins against Christ.