The problem is fundamental... It is as if a secret committee, now lost to history, has made a study of children and, having figured out what the greatest number were least disposed to declared that all of them should do it.

...Attempts at imitation would put the emphasis where it didn't belong. The goal was to improve the lives of others, not oneself.

That's when I feel most alive, he told me once on an airplane, when I'm helping people.

You do the right thing even if it makes you feel bad. The purpose of life is not to be happy but to be worthy of happiness.

Curing yourself of obsessive compulsive disorder by going to a strip club is pretty strange.

And I can imagine Farmer saying he doesn't care if no one else is willing to follow their example. He's still going to make these hikes, he'd insist, because if you say that seven hours is too long to walk for two families of patients, you're saying that their lives matter less than some others', and the idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that's wrong with the world.

The hardest thing was learning to write. I was 13, and the only writing I had done was for Social Studies. It consisted of copying passages right out of the encyclopedia