“A need for approval lies behind all efforts of evangelism. If someone else can be convinced, that will show us that we are on the right path. The attempt to convince someone of anything is a mark of insecurity. (173)”

“Say you are at the brink of killing yourself and someone tries to talk you out of it. You’ve already thought about it and your life is not worth living. Someone else comes along and tries to convince you not to kill yourself. Is there someone out there that can convince you not to kill yourself? What can they possibly say to convince you that your life, the one you have firsthand knowledge of, is worth living? There is that one answer. No one! There is that other answer. Nothing!”

“It doesn't take much convincing to make someone believe they're better than everyone else.”

“We all convince ourselves of things like this- not necessarily about Say Anything, but about any fictionalized portrayals of romance that happen to hit us in the right place, at the right time.”

“It is not trivial to lie in a report. . . . At the time I wrote it I actually believed what I wrote to be true, fervently. . . . Yet, when I wrote it, I also knew it wasn't true. I call this the lie of two minds. "I" convinced "myself." The I that did the convincing was the one who needed desperately to justify the entire experience, to make it sane and right and okay and approved. Myself was convinced as the moral self, the part of me I would want to be a judge in a legal system. This moral part of us, however, in these extreme situations, is vulnerable to the overwhelming force of that part of us that needs to justify our actions. . . With this lie I'd lost myself. Perhaps this too adds to the shame.”

“The longer I live and the more experience I have of the world, the more I am convinced that, after all, the one thing that is most worth living for-and dying for, if need be-is the opportunity of making someone else more happy.”