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

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.

Dream big, but stay humble.

What better way to try to begin to understand the nature and meaning of human memory than to investigate its absence?

An ocean which thinks there is nothing to learn from a lake is not a wise ocean!

Flowers are always more serious than they appear.

Moments. All gathering towards this one.

The more ambivalent you are and the more uncertain you are, then you can get something that you cannot anticipate.

I am thoroughly satisfied that smoking is detrimental to the intelligence of Australians who I notice now are beginning to look sickly, pale and intellectually destitute.

One of the interesting things is is that Judaism was very attractive to the Roman aristocracy.

When you're under stress as a human being, you behave oddly and your relationships with people become strained.

To a certain extent. I'm a fan of rehearsal on the day [of the shoot], more than getting together a week beforehand.