Leaving feels good and pure only when you leave something important, something that mattered to you. Pulling life out by the roots. But you can't do that until your life has grown roots.

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.

Sometimes, our pride compels us to engage in costly wars when a true commitment to a compromising peace would have been the best course to pursue.

They talk about big skies in the western United States, and they may indeed have them, but you have never seen such lofty clouds, such towering anvils, as in Iowa in July.

A focus on regulatory overreach, things that the benefit doesn't outweigh the cost, is probably the single greatest opportunity we have for having a positive impact on job creation.

Which of these statements creates more anxiety in you: 'There is no God' or 'There is no money'?

A more effective international disease surveillance system is essential for global security both against a bioterrorist attack or a naturally occurring disease.

The weak are meat the strong do eat.

I was 14 years old when I started rapping and I was terrible. I fell in love with it though and when that happens with me I become super passionate and go all the way with it.

I was forced to enter the basement of my soul and look directly at what was hidden there, and to choose, in the face of it all, not death but life.

If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian.

It's so much in me to want to keep experimenting all the time. It's just inherent.