I think when you're 16, if you have good parents, they generally just fade in the background. I had great parents, and because they were great, I thought very little about them in high school.

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.

If you discover the secret of diligence then you will not be an ordinary person

Is this not the reason I write, to leave a piece of me behind?

We see ourselves in terms of yesterday and today. Our Heavenly Father sees us in terms of forever.

When one is in a good sound rage, it is astonishing how calm one can be.

Brains are not everything.

I feel like I'm a filmmaker; I don't feel I need to yell 'action' and 'cut.'

The song is just the given. It's how you cover it that matters.

We give up too easily. We give up too soon. We quit praying right before the miracle happens.

Can it be that even as one grows to fit the space one lives in, one cannot grow until there's space to grow?

Character is undergoing constant change, for better or for worse--either being elevated on the one hand, or degraded on the other.