“Speculation was now news. News had been confused with fact. Fact had been replaced by expert opinion. People had been replaced by their biographies. Ability had been replaced by disability. Thinkin...”

“In literature, the reader standing at the threshold of the end of a book harbors no illusion that the end has not comehe or she can see where it finishes, the abyss the other side of the last chunk...”

“But now books and men had gone their separate ways. Who has the patience for a book? Only a book.”

“We had traveled far and long to get here but were still the same still-born, unreconstructed people who had once met on this landscape that began somewhere not too far south of the south and ended ...”

“Globalization has shipped products at a faster rate than anything else; its moved English into schools all over the world so that now there is Dutch English and Filipino English and Japanese Englis...”

“No adolescent ever wants to be understood, which is why they complain about being misunderstood all the time.”

“It pained me to imagine how our twosome appeared to others, marked as those kind of girls who belonged to each other. Those sexless fixtures of high school.”

“Girls are always saying things like, Im so unhappy that Im going to overdose on aspirin, but theyd be awfully surprised if they succeeded. They have no intention of dying. At the first sight of blo...”

“The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn't li...”

“I wonder if fears ever really go away, or if they just lose their power over us.”

“Fear is all in the mind”

“When you are grateful,' Brother Steindl-Rast explained, 'you are not fearful, and when you are not fearful, you are not violent. When you are grateful, you act out of a sense of enough and not out ...”

“There the old Eskimo hunters she had known in her childhood thought the riches of life were intelligence, fearlessness, and love. A man with these gifts was rich and was a great spirit who was admi...”

“True morality consists not in following the beaten track, but in finding the true path for ourselves, and fearlessly following it.”