“The machines men are so intent on making have carried them very far from the old sweet things.”

“Welcome to the real world, Scott. The sweet things in life don’t seem so sweet when you have to roll up your sleeves and fix the greasy machines that make them, do they?”

“I am seventeen. The good things about seventeen is that you’re not sixteen. Sixteen goes with the word sweet, and I am so far from sweet.”

“Memory is a landscape watched from the window of a moving train. (...) These things happen right before our very eyes, we know them to be real, but they're so far away we can't touch them. Some are so far, so very far away, and the train moving so fast, that we can't be sure any longer that they really did happen. Maybe we merely dreamed them?”

“It was very sad, he thought. The things men carried inside. The things men did or felt they had to do. ”

“It is impossible to live in autarchy, to make the testimony of faith, pray and fast and go to pilgrimage only, far from men and worrying about no one except oneself. It is worth repeating that to be with God is tantamount to being with men; to carry faith is tantamount to carrying the responsibility of a continuous social commitment. The teaching that we should extract from zakat is explicit: to posses is tantamount to having to share.”