“It's true that we are more open than our parents but that just means we accept sex and talk about it. It doesn't mean we are all jumping in bed together.”

“I still get angry when older people assume that everyone in my generation, screws around. They're probably the same ones who think all kids use dope. It's true that we are more open than our parents but that just means we accept sex and talk about it. It doesn't mean we are all jumping into bed together.”

“But love is this really powerful thing that everyone's got if they'd just learn how to accept it. I mean, come on. If it's something we all have to give, and if it's something we all want, doesn't that mean there's exactly enough to go around?”

“When we try to describe the truth with words, we distort it and it's no longer truth--it's our story. The story may be true for us, but that doesn't mean it's true for anyone else.”

“There was this girl,” I said. "l mean-” All of a sudden I felt flustered, and added, ”We were just friends.””No such thing.””We were.””Look. Despite what you may have heard, people have sex all the time with people they don't love, or particulary care about, or sometimes can't even stand. So why in the world do people say that it's just friends, like it doesn't mean as much, if you're not having sex? Real friendship is true and forever and with all your heart. It's not Relationship Lite.”

“...we, and I mean humans, are meaning makers. We do not discover the meanings of mysterious things, we invent them. We make meanings because meaninglessness terrifies us above all things. More than snakes, even. More than falling, or the dark. We trick ourselves into seeing meanings in things, when in fact all we are doing is grafting our meanings onto the universe to comfort ourselves. We gild the chaos of the universe with our symbols. To admit that something is meaningless is just like falling backward into darkness." (p184)”