“If nobody ever worried about what was in other people's heads, we’d all be 33 percent more effective in our lives and our jobs.”

“I've found that a substantial fraction of many people’s days is spentworrying about what others think of them. If nobody ever worriedabout what was in other people’s heads, we’d all be 33 percent moreeffective in our lives and on our jobs.”

“Most of our difficulties, our hopes, and our worries are empty fantasies. Nothing has ever existed except this moment. That's all there is. That's all we are. Yet most human beings spend 50 to 90 percent or more of their time in their imagination, living in fantasy. We think about what has happened to us, what might have happened, how we feel about it, how we should be different, how others should be different, how it's all a shame, and on and on; it's all fantasy, all imagination. Memory is imagination. Every memory that we stick to devastates our life.”

“Part of the job of being human is to consistently underestimate our effect on other people...”

“We’d both been stripped of all the evasiveness, all the lies, everything we’d ever kept from each other. Layer by layer, we had given up our defenses and our excuses and our demands for whys and hows, and what was left were two broken beings. Clinging to one last shred of hope. Tethered to each other.”

“Francis taught me that if we spent less time worrying about how to share our faith with someone on an airplane and more time thinking about how to live radically generous lives, more people would start taking our message seriously.”