“What is necessary, he explains, is an understanding that the youth are not the Other. It is being able to see your humanity reflected in them.”

“Isn't it also that on some fundamental level we find it difficult to understand that other people are human beings in the same way that we are? We idealize them as gods or dismiss them as animals.”

“Youth to youth, like the dragon-flies chasing each other, and love like the sun warming them through and through.”

“Involvement requires not only being able to give, but also being able to take from others--there must be [a] willingness to give the other [person] the pleasure of giving to you.”

“You need not specifically discuss the perspectives of different religions in your essay, so no research is necessary. Your knowledge, or lack thereof, has been established in the quizzes you've taken this semester. I am interested in how you are able to fit the uncontestable fact of suffering into your understanding of the world, and how you hope to navigate through life in spite of it.”

“Somewhere in the world there was a young woman with such splendid understanding that she'd see him entire, like a poem or story, and find his words so valuable after all that when he confessed his apprehensions she would explain why they were in fact the very things that made him precious to her...and to Western Civilization! There was no such girl, the simple truth being.”

“No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.”