“When I am battered and oppressed by the world that humanity has made - which is difference from the world that is was given - my primary defense, my consolation, is the absurdity of that world”

“This world, which has the potential to be Eden, is instead the hell before Hell. In our arrogance, we have made it so.”

“Given my heritage and the ordeal of my childhood, I sometimes wonder why I myself am not insane. Maybe I am.”

“The world is beautiful and glorious. Humanity can be mean, and turn away from what's good.”

“I am twenty years old. To a world-wise adult, I am little more than a child. To any child, however, I am old enough to be distrusted, to be excluded forever from the magical community of the short and beardless.”

“No one can genuinely love the world, which is too large to love entire. To love all the world at once is...dangerous self-delusion. Loving the world is like loving the idea of love, which is perilous because, feeling virtuous about this grand affection, you are freed from the struggles and the duties that come with loving people as individuals, with loving one place-home-above all others.I embrace the world on a scale that allows genuine love-the small places like a town, a neighborhood, a street-and I love life, because of what the beauty of this world and of this life portend.”

“...it will be a world made not bright but brighter, not clean but cleaner.”