“The world is an ugly stew, she thought.It's so ugly I can't stand it.”

“The world is absurd. Ugly absurd. To repair ugly absurdity, you can't just be normal. You need an alternative absurdity. A beautiful absurdity. We call it 'divine madness'.”

“I loved everyone who said yes to the world and tried to make it better instead of worse, because so much in the world was ugly- and just about all the ugly parts were due to humans.”

“The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad.”

“In places like this, it's hard to imagine that the world can be so ugly,' Thomas said. 'This is how it was meant to be,' Priya replied. 'The ugliness is our own fault.”

“I would like travelers, especially American travelers, to travel in a way that broadens their perspective, because I think Americans tend to be some of the most ethnocentric people on the planet. It's not just Americans, it's the big countries. It's the biggest countries that tend to be ethnocentric or ugly. There are ugly Russians, ugly Germans, ugly Japanese and ugly Americans. You don't find ugly Belgians or ugly Bulgarians, they're just too small to think the world is their norm.”