The trouble about jumping was that if you didn't pick the right number of storeys, you might still be alive when you hit bottom.

because wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.

There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends.

I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, "This is what it is to be happy.

I wanted to crawl in between those black lines of print, the way you crawl through a fence, and go to sleep under that beautiful big green fig-tree.

I felt very still and empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.

My mother said the cure for thinking too much about yourself was helping somebody who was worse off than you.

I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow.

There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room.

I began to think vodka was my drink at last. It didn’t taste like anything, but it went straight down into my stomach like a sword swallowers’ sword and made me feel powerful and godlike.

I may have made a straight A in physics, but I was panic-struck. Physics made me sick the whole time I learned it.

The Bible nowhere states that people before the law observed the Sabbath as a day of rest or worship.

He had his treasure, but finally all he wanted was his family. And peace.

It would be nice to design a real briefcase - you open it up and it's your computer but it also stores your books.

In my Gau, as far as I know, only Communists who had actually worked against the State were arrested.

Whenever there's the experience of a broken heart, there's the experience of fear.

One is just given a talent, and it's one's duty to make the most of it.

I lost my reputation, I forgot my truth. But I have my beauty and I have my youth.

I would never defend a cop - though I did on a few private cases, when cops were acting not as cops but as private citizens.

Selfishness is not living your life as you wish to live it. Selfishness is wanting others to live their lives as you wish them to.

I will always be open to receive my friends. I will not force myself on them.