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

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.

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.

You can't hate someone until you know what it might be like to love them.

I've turned my tears into prayers

Nothing makes me so happy as to observe nature and to paint what I see.

To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the inner music that words make.

With any kind of artistic thing, it's a muscle, like any athlete, and the moment you're not doing it, you lose all confidence. That's why I'm terrible with down time.

I'm new to the Twitterverse and so I'm attempting to build my followers. I'm trying to be a better tweeter. I try not to tweet too much, just when I've got something worthwhile to say.

Treat my first like my last and the last like my first and my thirst is the same as- when I came.

My mum said to me once years ago, which really spurred me on, 'You're the funniest person I know'. I loved that.

Rebellion per se is not a virtue. If it were, we would have some heroes on very low levels.

I never planned on doing a book about Paul Farmer or his organization. I met him in Haiti when I was on a magazine assignment. It's almost like his story sort of fell in my lap.