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

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.

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

In peacetime some sort of introduction is generally required to make a person's acquaintance

Know your genre. Know your history. Read a book.

What makes a good captain is someone that can lead and someone who dies for their team.

Don't compare me with Jesus. He is a great master, a great master.

Keep on moving: any motion is forward motion. You can always course-correct.

It was Nick's voice Nick's arms. He turned me on my back and swam with me, pulling me to the bank.

The best way to get children excited about reading is to read to them from the beginning of their lives.

Advertising is the ability to sense, interpret... to put the very heart throbs of a business into type, paper and ink.

The soul - your soul - knows all there is to know all the time. There's nothing hidden to it, nothing unknown. Yet knowing is not enough. The soul seeks to experience.

The activities of the liberated soul transcend the pairs of opposites.