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.

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.

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.

I buried my head under the darkness of the pillow and pretended it was night. I couldn't see the point of getting up. I had nothing to look forward to.

Wasn't growing catnip in one's yard the kitty equivalent of giving candy to children?

The Canadian spirit is cautious observant and critical where the American is assertive.

I learned from a very young age that if I pursued the things that truly excited me, that they would reward in more important ways, like happiness.

Part of me thinks that innovation, real innovation in health care delivery, needs to happen from the bottom to the top.

It's gonna be a lot of zeroes in that contract. You gonna think it's alphabet soup or something, all those zeroes in there.

If government could create jobs and raise children, socialism would have worked.

You may be as different as the sun and the moon, but the same blood flows through both your hearts. You need her, as she needs you.

Americans have been taught that their nation is civilized and humane. But, too often, U.S. actions have been uncivilized and inhumane.

The internet to me is kind of like a black hole, and I never really go on it.

People, in general, would rather die than forgive. It's that hard.