“Logical thinking keeps you from wasting time worrying, or hoping. It prevents disappointment. Imagination, on the other hand, only gets you hyped up over things that will never realistically happen.”

“It was one think to make a mistake, it was another thing to keep making it. I knew what happened when you let yourself get close to someone, when you started to believe they loved you: you'd be disappointed. Depend on someone, and you might as well admit you're going to be crushed, because when you really needed them, they wouldn't be there. Either that or you'd confide in them and you added to their problems. All you ever really had was yourself and that sort of sucked if you were less than reliable.”

“Why hadn’t he realized this before? Everyone knew that if you divided realityby expectation, you got a happiness quotient. But when you inverted the equation-expectationdivided by reality-you didn’t get the opposite of happiness. What you got, Lewis realized, was hope.Pure logic: Assuming reality was constant, expectation had to be greater than reality to createoptimism. On the other hand, a pessimist was someone with expectations lower than reality, afraction of diminishing returns. The human condition meant that this number approached zerowithout reaching it-you never really completely gave up hope; it might come flooding back at anyprovocation.”

“If only you could keep them that way: cast in amber, never growing up”

“It was one thing to make a mistake; it was another thing to keep making it. I knew what happened when you let yourself get close to someone, when you started to believe they loved you: you'd be disappointed. Depend on someone, and you might as well admit you're going to be crushed, because when you really needed them, they wouldn't be there. Either that, or you'd confide in them and you added to their problems. All you ever really had was yourself, and that sort of sucked if you were less than reliable.”

“You get through it, you just never get over it”

“Peter was, simply, what a person would look like if you boiled down the most raw emotions andfiltered them of any social contract. If you hurt, cry. If you rage, strike out.If you hope, get ready for a disappointment.”