“Those who embrace prejudice doom themselves to live in ignorance.”

“The mood is on me to-night only becuase I have listened to several hours of intelligent conversation and I am not a very brilliant person. Sometimes here on Pequod Island and back again on Beacon Street, I have the most curious delusion that our world may be a little narrow. I cannot avoid the impression that something has gone out of it (what, I do not know), and that our little world moves in an orbit of its own, a gain one of those confounded circles, or possibly an ellipse. Do you suppose that it moves without any relation to anything else? That it is broken off from some greater planet like the moon? We talk of life, we talk of art, but do we actually know anything about either? Have any of us really lived? Sometimes I am not entirely sure; sometimes I am afraid that we are all amazing people, placed in an ancestral mould. There is no spring, there is no force. Of course you know better than this, you who plunge every day in the operating room of the Massachusetts General, into life itself. Come up here and tell me I am wrong.”

“When absorbing the sadness of the loss, we must concentrate on bad guys to demonize, or black holes of sympathy in which we get to play the cosmic victim of terrible circumstances. Demonizing and victimizing are the sources of those stories in which we can get so woefully stuck”

“Most people in the world don't know who the Apleys are and they don't give a damn. I don't intend this as rudeness, but as a sort of comfort. I know it has been a comfort to me sometimes. Just remember that most people don't give a damn. When you remember it, you won't feel the necessity of taking the Apleys so seriously.”

“Science is the topography of ignorance.”

“He who cannot remember the past is doomed. DOOMED!”

“The suffering that started off challenging our being and our ideas of what life is and should be ends up opening our heart, expanding our identity, and connecting us forever to the human family and life.”