...[P]eople who shout joy from the rooftops are often the saddest of all... (p.24)

The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.

The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.

There is a certain part of all of us that lives outside of time. Perhaps we become aware of our age only at exceptional moments and most of the time we are ageless.

Those who consider the Devil to be a partisan of Evil and angels to be warriors for Good accept the demagogy of the angels. Things are clearly more complicated.

Dreaming is not merely an act of communication; it is also an aesthetic activity, a game of the imagination, a game that is a value in itself.

Her drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness. What fell to her lot was not the burden but the unbearable lightness of being.

The worst thing is not that the world is unfree, but that people have unlearned their liberty.

When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.

In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.

Memory does not make films, it makes photographs.

When we begin to view our experiences through the lens of gratitude, our heart, mind and spirit naturally expand.

...the most important thing you must remember when dealing with a politically biased professor is to be friendly.

Overcoming fear and conceiving this 'art of more' should be a fundamental practice in what it is that you do and make.

We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves

The problem of pretending to be alive.

What I've noticed is that when people win huge and they have those huge, huge successes, sometimes they forget about the actual acting of it, and sometimes it's hard to come down from their perch.

I looked at my palms trying to see the other life, the parallel life. The point at which my selves broke away and one married a fat man and the other stayed here.

Arranging is sort of the most exciting part of making music right now for me. I really enjoy the process of arranging because you're given all the time that you need to decide on every single note.

The ghosts you chase you never catch.

I had a wonderful childhood, but I was a wanderer from year one.