“Or he’d watch the news: more plagues, more famines, more floods, more insect or microbe or small-mammal outbreaks, more droughts, more chickenshit boy-soldier wars in distant countries. Why was everything so much like itself?”

“War is like peace, only much more so.”

“Love is blind, they say--but isn't it more that love makes us see too much? Isn't it more that love floods our brain with sights and sounds, so that everything looks bigger, brighter, more lovely than ever before?”

“We lose more women to marriage than war, famine, and disease.”

“The average Bhutanese knows much more about the world than the average American...(for Americans)It is more comfortable to watch fake news about celebrities than to know what's happening in China or southern Sudan. But events happening in China or Sudan affect us so much more because they are real.”

“animals are indeed more ancient, more complex and in many ways more sophisticated than us. They are more perfect because they remain within Nature's fearful symmetry just as Nature intended. They should be respected and revered, but perhaps none more so than the elephant, the world's most emotionally human land mammal.”