“The most important person you will ever talk to is yourself”

“You haven’t prepared yourself for worship if you just practice musical art”

“All we can do in life is play along and hope that we get it right. ”

“We aren't who we appear to be on the outside...We keep up appearances in order to survive...”

“I fared better than many of the people I wrote about in this book; yet even so, over the course of the events depicted here, I lost the person I cared for most. The war didn't get her; it got me.”

“Other lives wind themselves into your own and then leave for distant places or wink out like extinguished lamps, and then all the evidence you have that there was ever any time is a few scribbled words and a few blurred pictures. Then those burn in fire or blow away in wind and you have nothing.”

“I would rather my heart be without words than my words be without heart.”