The urge to make art or contemplate philosophy does not go away when you are sick. Those urges just become transfigured by illness.

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.

Discouraging words should not weigh you down instead they should challenge you

The woman I loved died because I did not love her enough - what greater sin is there than that?"(Uncle Chaim and Aunt Fifke and the Angel)

There is an easy way to measure our inner levels of abjectness and friendliness to ourselves: we should examine how well we response to noise.

The very act of drawing an object, however badly, swiftly takes the drawer from a woolly sense of what the object looks like to a precise awareness of its component parts and particularities.

In places in the world where we don't speak the same language, or even understand that we pray to the same God, we dance to the same beat, that is the ONE.

Intellectualism came very late to America. That's why Americans are so proud of it. I found very few real intellectuals in America. But there are so many pseudo-intellectuals.

My eye is educated to discover anything on the ground, as chestnuts, etc. It is probably wholesomer to look at the ground much than at the heavens.

The right kind of fear will keep us from doing wrong. The rough is only mental - it is rough only because your think it is.

The balls of sight are so formed, that one man's eyes are spectacles to another, to read his heart with.

Neither the depth of despondency nor the height of euphoria tells you how long either will last.