“The worldly man treats certain people kindly because he 'likes' them: the Christian, trying to treat every one kindly, finds him liking more and more people as he goes on - including people he could not even have imagined himself liking at the beginning.”

“He was like fungus. The kind people got under their toenail. They treat it and treat it, but eventually they just have to say “Fuck it” and cover it up with nail polish to forget it’s there. –Trish referring to Landyn”

“When we decide what to do, we in effect proclaim our wish that our conduct be made into a "universal law." Therefore when a rational being decides to treat people in a certain way he decrees that in his judgement, this is the way people ought to be treated. Thus if we treat him the same way in return we are doing nothing more than treating him as he has decided people are to be treated.”

“And the more she could imagine this island, the less she liked the real world. The more she could imagine the people, the less she liked any real people.”

“One of the commonest and most generally accepted delusions is that every man can be qualified in some particular way -- said to be kind, wicked, stupid, energetic, apathetic, and so on. People are not like that. We may say of a man that he is more often kind than cruel, more often wise than stupid, more often energetic than apathetic or vice versa; but it could never be true to say of one man that he is kind or wise, and of another that he is wicked or stupid. Yet we are always classifying mankind in this way. And it is wrong. Human beings are like rivers; the water is one and the same in all of them but every river is narrow in some places, flows swifter in others; here it is broad, there still, or clear, or cold, or muddy or warm. It is the same with men. Every man bears within him the germs of every human quality, and now manifests one, now another, and frequently is quite unlike himself, while still remaining the same man.”

“She had not understood what he said, but she took him in with a glance that made Will feel like he had just had one of those full-body MRI scans, the kind that find more things wrong with you than you ever could have imagined.”