“It's true that nothing in this world makes us so necessary to others as the affection we have for them.”

“The world is a den of thieves, and night is falling. Evil breaks its chains and runs through the world like a mad dog. The poison affects us all. No one escapes. Therefore let us be happy while we are happy. Let us be kind, generous, affectionate and good. It is necessary and not at all shameful to take pleasure in the little world.”

“If we have forgotten our total dependency upon God, then there is nothing left for us but to try to depend upon other people’s attention to us, because without such attention we don’t even feel like human beings. Instead of paying attention to God, we become beggars for the attention of others, constantly trying to make them pity us or look up to us. But this is not true human relatedness, only mutual idolatry.”

“The biggest problems we have in this world are because of what we assume about each other. People make decisions based on appearance or gender or race, without getting to know anyone in that group. Or they have a very limited sample. Then they say things and other people hear them and start to believe them. Pretty soon we have a cultural bias that affects all kinds of decisions.”

“This is a work of fiction. Still, given an infinite number of possible worlds, it must be true on one of them. And if a story set in an infinite number of possible worlds is true in one of them, then it must be true in all of them. So maybe, it's not as fictional as we think.”

“Perfection is overrated, boring. It's the imperfections--the vulnerabilities, the weaknesses, the human elements--that make us who we are, that make us real, beautiful . . . necessary.”