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.

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.

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.

Do you think we can be friends?” I asked.He stared up at the ceiling. “Probably not, but we can pretend.

As I make my slow pilgrimage through the world, a certain sense of beautiful mystery seems to gather and grow.

Bush met with former President Jimmy Carter. Jimmy Carter is 76 years old, or as Democrats call him 'their bright new star of the future.'

I doubt if there is any single individual within the scientific community who could cope with the full range of [creationist] arguments without the help of an army of consultants in special fields.

Buy at a faire, but sell at home. [Buy at a fair, but sell at home.]

You're everything I hope for. You're everything I need. You are so beautiful to me.

Our technology forces us to live mythically, but we continue to think fragmentarily, and on single, separate planes.

We don't have a trillion-dollar debt because we haven't taxed enough; we have a trillion-dollar debt because we spend too much.

Standing outside the cultural hysteria the trend is fairly clear. It is a trend toward temporal compression and the emergence of ambiguity.

. . . [I]n the kingdom of charity, one prefers to suffer some inconvenience rather than inconvenience the neighbor.