The trick is to love somebody.... If you love one person, you see everybody else differently.

I want to be an honest man and a good writer.

If the relationship of father to son could really be reduced to biology, the whole earth would blaze with the glory of fathers and sons.

One cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one's own.

If I could make you stay, I would,’ he shouted. ‘If I had to beat you, chain you, starve you—if I could make you stay, I would.’ He turned back into the room; the wind blew his hair. He shook his finger at me, grotesquely playful. ‘One day, perhaps, you will wish I had.

I'm beginning to think that maybe everything that happens makes sense. Like, if it didn't make sense, how could it happen?

I think that the inability to love is the central problem, because that inability masks a certain terror, and that terror is the terror of being touched. And if you can't be touched, you can't be changed. And if you can't be changed, you can't be alive.