“Sex can lead to nasty things like herpes, gonorrhea, and something called relationships.”

“It's nice to be important, but it's also important to be nice. Never forget that.”

“empathy is like a universal solvent. Any problem immersed in empathy becomes soluble.”

“I remember sitting in the Beth Shalom synagogue in Cambridge on the night of Kol Nidre. Peter Lipton, a friend and an atheist philosopher, was giving a sermon on the theme of “atonement:” “If we treat another person as essentially bad, we dehumanize him or her. If we take the view that every human being has some good in them, even if it is only 0.1 percent of their makeup, then by focusing on their good part, we humanize them. By acknowledging and attending to and rewarding their good part, we allow it to grow, like a small flower in a desert.”

“You can pretend to be serious; you can't pretend to be witty.”

“When everything is never as it seems, how can you tell the illusions from the reality?”

“Yeah I missed you since the place got wrecked By the winds of change and the weeds of sex looks like freedom but it feels like death it's something in between, I guess it's closing time.”