“If we are kind and considerate, people will want to be around us, and we benefit from enduring circles of attention and care.”

“And my parents made me want i am. So what? We get stuff from our parents, but we also get stuff from the world around us. From people around us. And at the end of the day, we're us.”

“What you said was true. we don't live or love in a vacuum. There are people around us who care about us who would be hurt, maybe destroyed if we let ourselves feel what we might want to feel.”

“Desire is both imitative (we like what others like) and competitive (we want to take away from others what they have). As children, we wanted to monopolize the attention of a parent, to draw it away from other siblings. This sense of rivalry... makes people compete for the attention.”

“When we live in the love of God, we begin to pay attention to people the way God pays attention to us.”

“So many things beat upon us in a lifetime that simply enduring may seem almost beyond us… But the test a loving God has set before us is not to see if we can endure difficulty. It is to see if we can endure it well. We pass the test by showing that we remembered Him and the commandments He gave us. And to endure well is to keep those commandments whatever the opposition, whatever the temptation, and whatever the tumult around us.”