“The best fact I know is that kindred souls collect like dew to morning thistle. So if any of this gets out of hand, or collapses to pillars of bromide and dust, or our solitary struggle is cheapened and dashed, I'll die knowing we were all stupid in stupid togetherness, and the allure, lustre, good in that phrase consoles my wanting spirit, that we made it all too messy, but kicked out the jams in the process.”

“God Sophie... If there were any chance we could be together... If there were any woman I'd want to be the mother of my... Shit, this is so hard.""No, Hunt, it's simple. If right now is all we have, if this is all we get, then I'll grab it with both hands and take all I can.”

“If you leave a bunch of eleven-year-olds to their own devices, what you get is Lord of the Flies. Like a lot of American kids, I read this book in school. Presumably it was not a coincidence. Presumably someone wanted to point out to us that we were savages, and that we had made ourselves a cruel and stupid world. This was too subtle for me. While the book seemed entirely believable, I didn't get the additional message. I wish they had just told us outright that we were savages and our world was stupid.”

“The course made me think a bit, you know. That we're smart enough to get out of here. We're just too stupid to work out a way.”

“When a war breaks out, people say: "It's too stupid; it can't last long." But though a war may well be "too stupid," that doesn't prevent its lasting. Stupidity has a knack of getting its way; as we should see if we were not always so much wrapped up in ourselves.”

“Identification is why the reader reads and why the writer writes. We all want to identify with a character, so that we can, in turn, identify with ourselves. Do you have yourself all figured out? Is your self-knowledge so complete? Do you know yourself so well that you'll never do anyting stupid or make a fool of yourself again? When it comes to knowing ourselves, we are incomplete, lacking, deficient. Each of us is our own ongoing problem until the day we die.”