...It sounded like a dragon breathing in time with me, like I had this pet dragon who was cuddled up next to me and cared enough about me to time his breaths to mine.

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.

The author likens crisis, and particularly war, to stop motion photography in its capacity to make changes plain that are ordinarily too gradual to be seen.

No Spring nor Summer beauty hath such grace As I have seen in one Autumnal face.

Silence is a protective coating over pain.

The burden of happiness can only be relieved by the balm of suffering.

I'd much rather have a book that a few people love intensely than a book that a lot of people like okay.

I always sang and I always wrote...it's just having that ambition. You really can't let go of your dreams.

I'm a discursive thinker, so quotation has played an active role in the structure and content of my books from the beginning.

To the extent that animals continue to die needlessly, we are morally bound to speak.

I'm a Midwesterner by birth, and when I traveled there, when I was young, most of the small towns were thriving, vibrant places.

...doing more with less.