“Everything distracted me, but most of all myself.”

“What, I ask, drives me to disorder? How can I diagnose myself? All I feel, most immediately, is the most anguished need for physical love and mental companionship”

“… there is a wish in the heart of mankind to be distracted and confused. Truth is but one attraction, and not always the most powerful.”

“Everything's a gamble, love most of all.”

“It no longer makes me cry and die and tear myself to see her go because everything goes away from me like that now”

“Why just before last Christmas
My baby went away
And I find it real surprising
For myself to hear me say
That everything is cool
Everything's okay”

“Once centenarian teacher who had the body of an adolescent told me he had studied martial arts. "Me, too," I answered. We were in Notre Dame, and he said, "Attack me." I put myself in a combat position, and he moved his left hand in such an incredibly beautiful way that while I looked at it, fascinated, he gave me a big slap. "Beauty is the most dangerous weapon," he warned. It took me a long time to understand. He used a secret Chinese practice, which consists of drawing a snake in the air with your hand to distract the enemy. And that is how beauty is: the most awful weapon.”

“Take me. Take all of me. The good and the bad. Everything. Take it all.”

“Nostalgia is one of the legitimate and certainly one of the most enduring of human emotions; but the politics of nostalgia is at best distracting, at worst pernicious.”

“I don't like favors; they oppress and make me fell like a slave. I'd rather do everything for myself, and be perfectly independent.”