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.

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

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.

All forms of madness, bizarre habits, awkwardness in society, general clumsiness, are justified in the person who creates good art.

Group idea sessions rarely work. Why? Members too busy knocking down insights to hear the tap-tap of revelation

A good attitude, a positive perspective, a smiling face, a strong laugh are all highly contagious. Why not start spreading them?

A day of bad writing is always better than a day of no writing.

There was always an unspoken generosity about my mom.

I'm one with New York, and New York is one with me. I grew up there; there's no escaping it. We're like Siamese twins, if you separate us, I'll die.

I hope to inspire people, influence people.

Going back into the history of a word, very often into Latin, we come back pretty commonly to pictures or models of how things happen or are done.

But in those days - in the mid-'50s, early '60s - there was less than 300 radio stations that were playing country music and a lot of that wasn't full time.

I have tried my best to keep my country alive by writing about it.