“Victimology is incompatible with growth and healing. If we want one, we must be prepared to give up the other.”

“We are never responsible for another person’s abusive or toxic behaviour. We don’t “choose it” or “create it” … we didn’t “sign on for it in a previous life” and it’s not our “karma” coming to bite us on our ass-ets.”

“We look at each other with shy relief. It's the look two odd socks give when they recognise each other in the wild.”

“We have no way of knowing, of course, why some are born in health and affluence, while others enter broken bodies or broken homes, or emerge into a realm of war or hunger. So we cannot give definite meaning to our place in the world, or to our neighbor's. But Plato's reflections should give us pause and invite both humility and hope. Humility, because if we chose our lot in life, there is every reason to suspect merit, and not disfavor, is behind disadvantaged birth. A blighted life may have been the more courageous choice--at least it was for Plato... So how can we feel pride in our own blessedness, or condescension in another's misfortune? And Plato's reflections should give us hope, because his myth reminds us that suffering can be sanctifying, that pain is not punishment ,and that the path to virtue is fraught with opposition.”

“never trouble trouble until trouble troubles you”

“Do you know what people really want? Everyone, I mean. Everybody in the world is thinking: I wish there was just one other person I could really talk to, who could really understand me, who'd be kind to me. That's what people really want, if they're telling the truth.”

“Why oh why, I thought, are we British brought up to not show emotions? Stiff upper lip and all that. Right now I could have done with the Wailing Wall – all to myself.”