“There's no meanness too spiteful or too cruel, Didier once said to me, when we hate someone for all the wrong reasons.”

“There's nothing wrong with wanting to be with someone.""There is when your only reason is the being, not the someone.”

“Didier once told me, in a rambling, midnight dissertation, that a dream is the place where a wish and a fear meet. When the wish and the fear are exactly the same, he said, we call the dream a nightmare.”

“We all start out thinking that there is such a thing as perfection and that there's something wrong with us if we settle for less. First we won't eat the food with the brown spots. Then we hate ourselves because we have our own brown spots—pimples or ears that are too big or legs that are too skinny.”

“There are plenty of good reasons for fighting, I said, but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too.”

“The silly sentimentalists of the French Revolution talked of the Rights of Man! We hate Rights as we hate Wrongs. We have abolished Right and Wrong.And Right and Left, said Syme with a simple eagerness, I hope you will abolish them too. They are much more troublesome to me.”