“Normal: lacking in taste, compassion, understanding, kindness, and ordinary human decency.”
“Physical experiences, lacking the joys of love, depend on twists and perversions of pleasure. Abnormal pleasures kill the taste for normal ones.”
“I've got tons of things I don't understand about myself. We're both normal "ordinary”
“The highest forms of understanding we can achieve are laughter and human compassion.”
“Don’t underrate ordinary human decency,” Josh said quietly. “There’s more of heaven in a guy who hands a cold soda to a hot, tired panhandler than there is in fifty moral philosophers.”
“Compassion constitutes a radical form of criticism, for it announces that the hurt is to be taken seriously, that the hurt is not to be accepted as normal and natural but is an abnormal and unacceptable condition for humanness.”