“1. Whose problem is this? 2. What can I do to help him experience the problem? 3. What am I doing to keep him from experiencing the problem?”

“Solitary people, these book lovers. I think it's swell that there are people you don't have to worry about when you don't see them for a long time, you don't have to wonder what they do, how they're getting along with themselves. You just know that they're all right, and probably doing something they like.”

“When I write, I am trying through the movement of my fingers to reach my head. I’m trying to build a word ladder up to my brain.”

“There is no such thing as tough love. Love is kind, love is compassionate, love is tender.”

“Sometimes, I am the beast in the darkness. Sometimes, I am the ghost.”

“Militaries torture children to ‘keep people safe’ and corporations destroy the environment to ‘give you jobs’.”

“People often call me an optimist, because I show them the enormous progress they didn't know about. That makes me angry. I'm not an optimist. That makes me sound naive. I'm a very serious “possibilist”. That’s something I made up. It means someone who neither hopes without reason, nor fears without reason, someone who constantly resists the overdramatic worldview. As a possibilist, I see all this progress, and it fills me with conviction and hope that further progress is possible. This is not optimistic. It is having a clear and reasonable idea about how things are. It is having a worldview that is constructive and useful.”

“You may ask why I allow my face to drown in less and less joy with each passing year and I will say I just woke up one day and I was a still photo in everyone else's home but my own. or I will say I promise that my legs just need another season, and then I will be who you fell in love with again. and then probably just I'm sorry that there was once a tremendous blue sky and then a decade of hard, incessant rain.”