“I think honesty is important like you said. But what I actually think is that the key to a good relationship is forgiveness, because without it we're all completely screwed. [...] Because we're all human, and we all make mistakes. Without forgiveness, we'd all be walking this Earth angry and alone, and I think that would really suck.”

“All right. I'll bite. Here's what I think, with the caveat that I may be wrong. I think we're here to make the world a better place than we found it. I think we don't always deserve the cards we're dealt, good or bad. But we are judged by how we play the cards we're dealt. Those of us with a bum deal that makes it harder to do good -- we just have to work a little more is all. There's no destiny. There's just muddling through without doing to much damage.”

“Would you think it strange if I said I was having a good time? We're lost and confused and carrying around a cat. By all accounts, I should be feeling completely at a loss. Irritated.”

“Most of us all walk around as if we're sleepwalking. We really don't experience the world fully, because we're half-asleep, doing things we automatically think we have to do.”

“I don't know if I continue, even today, always liking myself. But what I learned to do many years ago was to forgive myself. It is very important for every human being to forgive herself or himself because if you live, you will make mistakes- it is inevitable. But once you do and you see the mistake, then you forgive yourself and say, 'Well, if I'd known better I'd have done better,' that's all. So you say to people who you think you may have injured, 'I'm sorry,' and then you say to yourself, 'I'm sorry.' If we all hold on to the mistake, we can't see our own glory in the mirror because we have the mistake between our faces and the mirror; we can't see what we're capable of being. You can ask forgiveness of others, but in the end the real forgiveness is in one's own self. I think that young men and women are so caught by the way they see themselves. Now mind you. When a larger society sees them as unattractive, as threats, as too black or too white or too poor or too fat or too thin or too sexual or too asexual, that's rough. But you can overcome that. The real difficulty is to overcome how you think about yourself. If we don't have that we never grow, we never learn, and sure as hell we should never teach.”

“I think, actually, that none of us understands anyone else very well, because we're all too shy to show what matters the most. If you ask me, it's a major design flaw. We ought to be able to say, Here, look what I am. I think it would be quite a relief.”