She sat one of the fluffy cats in my lap and stuffed the other down my shirt. She turned and left. 'There,' said the large man. 'The kittens will make your sad go away.

Which would prove I'm a monster, Arnie? Sacrificing the people I love for the fight? Or walking away from the fight to save the people i love?

The Chinese concept of rights arose, then, in a context of power. Western nations had become powerful enough, and imposed their will in nakedly aggressive fashion, so that they had to be addressed in their terms. Eventually rights in Chinese thought are attributed not just to nation states but also to individual people.

Tried to escape, to block out the fact that I was being eaten alive by arachnids. For some reason the only thing I could replace it with was the image of being eaten by tiny clowns.

All of society is built to prop up that lie, the whole world a big, noisy puppet show meant to distract us from the fact that at the end, you'll die, and you'll probably be alone.

The things we call cultures are dynamic, internally diverse, and their interpretation is internally contested among its members. Cultures are like ongoing conversations with many voices, often telling stories about who "we" are.

We depend for so much on those we love that of course we want them to have desirable personal qualities and to believe that we do too. But if we pin our love for another, and theirs for us, based on personal qualities, it confers an unacceptable conditionality and substitutability on love: we don't want to be exchanged for a better model of whatever our lovers deem to be desirable, so there is a strong tendency to want: to be loved for no reason at all, simply be loved.