“In adverse circumstances, every creature becomes something else, evolving or devolving. What makes us human is that we know what we once were, and, let us hope, we remember how to change back.”

“There are no shortcuts, in life or in love. This pain must be felt. The alternative is much worse. It's what makes us special, what makes us beautiful, what, what makes us worthy; the pain of how we love. But that pain is accompanied by something else, isn't it? Hope. With your pain, there is hope. And that is where you are. Somewhere between agony and optimism and prayer. So you're human. You're alive. And that is what we have.”

“Love and friendship. They are what make us who we are, and what can change us, if we let them.”

“We were, all of us, prisoners of our character, unable to alter our true inner natures. When we said we had changed, what had only really changed was our luck. Put us in the same circumstances as our previous folly and suddenly we’d revert, all of us, to what we were. That’s what I believed”

“Hope and fear come from feeling that we lack something; they come from a sense of poverty. We can’t simply relax with ourselves. We hold on to hope, and hope robs us of the present moment. We feel that someone else knows what's going on, but that there's something missing in us, and therefore something is lacking in our world.”

“within the core of each of us is the child we once were. This child constitutes the foundation of what we have become, who we are, and what we will be.”