“By first grade, my sense of worth was in direct proportion to what I learned and what I contributed back to the class. I had already become a human doing instead of a human being.”

“I hope that each of you girls will become an individual of significant worth and a person of virtue so that your contributions are maintained in both human and eternal terms.”

“But what did I have left to contribute? Just this? Just being the last known pair of truly human eyes to look up into the sky and experience the ␣eeting ␣ush of hope? Being a person, I had come to realize, is a communal activity. Dogs know how to be dogs. But people do not know how to be people unless and until they learn from other people.”

“Since I am not actually a real human being, my emotional responses are generally limited to what I have learned to fake.”

“Underlying James's career crisis was a psychological crisis. He had to confront what was really true about himself. Faced with the competing job offer, James had been asking people, "What should I do?" instead of, "What do I really want? What gives me a sense of self-worth?”

“I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.”