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

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?

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 road to enlightenment is long and difficult, and you should try not to forget snacks and magazines.

We see eternity through a microscopic window of time.

Death is the vehicle God uses to get us from here to where we are going. Before you take that ride, make sure you know in what direction you are heading.

The teacher is like the candle which lights others in consuming itself.

I want to act because I don't know how to do anything else.

He who prefers to give Linus the half of what he wishes to borrow, rather than to lend him the whole, prefers to lose only the half.

We have a world of pleasure to win, and nothing to lose but boredom.

When times are bad, the gloves come off and employers are less nice. People become disposable.

Track and field was very big when I was growing up.

Sleep knits up the raveled sleeve of care.