And then he thought: Is this how idiots rationalize their stupidity to themselves?

Bean could see the hunger in their eyes. Not the regular hunger, for food, but the real hunger, the deep hunger, for family, for love, for belonging.

a lot of human behavior was really acting out our responses to dangers long past.

Aw, Poke, you poor, kind, decent, stupid girl. You saved me and I let you down.

I want to be the kind of boy you are, thought Bean. But I don’t want to go through what you’ve been through to get there.

I'm not stupid!" In Bean's experience, that was a sentence never uttered except to prove its own inaccuracy.

You frighten me, when you say there isn't time.""I don't see why. Christians have been expecting the imminent end of the world for millennia.""But it keeps not ending.""So far, so good.

Because human nature never changes.

These children had never looked death in the face and then chosen to live anyway.

You deplore what I did, but you still want to know the results of my research.

...the object of waging a war is always to be in a better position in which to wage another war.

Misbehavior and punishment are not opposites that cancel each other - on the contrary they breed and reinforce each other.

I wish upon a glimmering star, My hopes as distant and as far. So if this wish does not come true, I’m thankful for the few that do.

I'm pretty good at weaseling my way into a job, even if I have no business being there.

We need a leader, not a reader.

Why do we pigeonhole and label an artist? It is a sure way of missing the important, the contradictory, the things that make him or her unique.

People have this idea that nature dictates a sort of 1950s sitcom version of what males and females are like. That is just not the case in the insect world.

It's hard to fathom the psychology of the economics of art. I don't quite understand it, and I don't necessarily want to understand it.

The fall of a given weight from a height of around 365 meters corresponds to the heating of an equal weight of water from 0° to 1°.

I learned to change my accent; in England, your accent identifies you very strongly with a class, and I did not want to be held back.