“It's a terrible waste to be happy and not notice it.”

“Be soft. Do not let the world make you hard. Do not let the pain make you hate. Do not let the bitterness steal your sweetness. Take pride that even though the rest of the world may disagree, you still believe it to be a beautiful place.”

“Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what's inside you, to make your soul grow.”

“True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.”

“You meet saints everywhere. They can be anywhere. They are people behaving decently in an indecent society.”

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.”

“And what is literature, Rabo," he said, "but an insider's newsletter about affairs relating to molecules, of no importance to anything in the universe but a few molecules who have the disease called 'thought'.”