“If everyone were allowed to interpret the ambiguous passages for themselves, their conclusions might diverged wildly. People would move apart in as many different directions as there were people, the community would fragment, and the world swallow up the pieces and who was to say the great revelation would not then vanish as if it had never been?”

“Say you were split, you were split in fragments and none of the pieces would talk to you. Wouldn't you want to be who you had been? Well, maybe I'd want that too.”

“I began to realize that I had tended to avoid some people because of my instant conclusions about who they were and what they would have to say. I discovered that everyone, speaking honestly and openly, had important things to tell me.”

“Giuseppe would miss them as well, but in a different way than he would miss the city. A city would stay the same. The same buildings. The same streets. Not forever, but for a great long while. But Frederick and Hannah would never again be the people they were right now, standing on the dock, wishing him farewell. Tomorrow they would wake up and be a little bit different and a little bit different the day after that, and in no time they might become people he did not recognize. Giuseppe knew it because they were already different from when he had first met them. He knew it because he was different from when they had first met him.”

“And the people under the sky were also very much the same...everywhere, all over the world, hundreds or thousands of millions of people just like this, people ignorant of one another's existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same -- people who had never learned to think but were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world.”

“In a perfect world mothers would all want their babies, and strangers would open up their homes to the unloved. In a perfect world everthing would be either black or white, right or wrong, and everyone would know the difference. But this isn't a perfect world. The problem is people who think it is.”