Truth defies simplicity.

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.

In life, you will always be faced with a series of God-ordained opportunities brilliantly disguised as problems and challenges.

The means ought to be proportioned to the end; the persons from whose agency the attainment of any end is expected ought to possess the means by which it is to be attained.

By then Esthappen and Rahel had learned that the world had other ways of breaking men. They were already familiar with the smell. Sicksweet. Like old roses on a breeze.

Give thanks to the most high.

Nothing is more misleading to the youth of a nation than to state the outcome immediately after the beginning as if nothing could have taken place in between.

I barely belong to this world, but still I'm participating.

Average wages now are still just barely above poverty, and one out of three Americans cannot afford healthcare even with the insurance,with jobs.

Man is rated the highest animal, at least among all animals who returned the questionnaire.

A Librettist is a mere drudge in the world of opera.

To be honest, I don't know. I started one [book] back in 1982 or '83 when I first retired. But I was only 25 or 26 and not ready to write my memoirs.