Scared isn't a good excuse. Scared is the excuse everyone has always used.

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.

And he looked lonely enough that she said, 'If you like, you could be my friend'.

I have had so many evidences of [God's] direction, so many instances when I have been controlled by some other power than my own will, that I cannot doubt that this power comes from above.

And can a man his own quietus make with a bare bodkin?

And I come from a small Vietnamese family. We're really close too, all ten of us.

Books are to be distinguished by the grandeur of their topics even more than by the manner in which they are treated.

Live as big as you can, with what you've got.

In this world we do not see things as they are. We see them as we are, because what we see depends mainly on what we are looking for.

I was born and raised during Depression Years when we were on County relief and we all went out and we hustled. we worked. I worked in a restaurant, I washed dishes.

What is now reason was formerly impulse or instinct.

Everybody likes to have a place to think, to meditate, to eat a burrito.