“If you can’t let go of the past, the mistakes you’ve made will eat you alive.”

“Everyone should have this, he thought, and perhaps, at the end, everyone does. Perhaps in their time of dying, everyone rises.”

“Love is messy. It's not easily controlled. But that's what makes it so powerful. It's unbridled passion. It's caring about someone else's life more than you care about your own.”

“Happiness can never hope to command so much interest as distress.”

“The moral here is that nature and nurture should not be opposed. Pure learning, in the absence of any innate constraints, simply does not exist.”

“Introspection makes our conscious motives and strategies transparent to us, while we have no sure means of deciphering them in others. Yet we never genuinely know our true selves. We remain largely ignorant of the actual unconscious determinants of our behavior, and therefore we cannot accurately predict what our behavior will be in circumstances beyond the safety zone of our past experience. The Greek motto “Know thyself,” when applied to the minute details of our behavior, remains an inaccessible ideal. Our “self” is just a database that gets filled in through our social experiences, in the same format with which we attempt to understand other minds, and therefore it is just as likely to include glaring gaps, misunderstandings, and delusions.”

“Your brain loves habits because they are simple, structured, well-known, energy efficient, quick, and automatic.”

“Blind passion was one thing, all-knowing intimacy a rarer commodity.”