“I alternate between feeling sympathetic toward humanity and being a misanthrope. When I'm sympathetic, it usually means I haven't been around people in awhile.”

“I'm sympathetic to the nuns' violent impulses. I mean, if I'd given up sex to devote myself to a man who I had to just trust loved me, despite never being physically around to prove it, I'd probably be smacking little children too.”

“In fact, we are often more interesting and sympathetic as human beings when something has gone wrong than when we are convinced of our own infallibility.”

“How sympathetic you look, Anne…as sympathetic as only seventeen can look.”

“In art vanity is equally fatal to sympathetic feeling, whether on the part of the artist or the public.”

“I feel jerked around. I feel sympathetic. I feel abused. It's almost harder to see Nathaniel on the good days than the bad, because you let yourself be deceived into thinking he's going to stay that way...And I can't just walk away. Part of it is the desire to follow through on something that's become more important and meaningful in my life, and to satisfy the human instinct to help someone less fortunate. And maybe there's something more.”