“What was the opposite of linkage blindness? What described being certain of something without any kind of evidence?…The term was faith.”

Yes,” Howie said solemnly. “I can teach you how to be more ‘street’”. “For God’s sake…” “Or is it ‘urban’? I can’t remember. Anyway, I can teach you, grasshopper. Or hip-hopper.

You don’t swing at any pitch. You swing at the ones you can hit.

And what? Accidentally cuts off three fingers postmortem? ‘Oops, oh, no, my girlfriend just died! Clumsy me, in trying to perform CPR, I chopped off some fingers! Guess I’ll just take them with me…. Oh, darn, where did that middle finger go?

Are you stalking me, Mr. Fulton?” The idea both amused and horrified Jazz.

Homecoming’s stupid.” And it is. Buch of kids looking for excuses to grope eachother all night.

Yes, pain meant life. But the symmetric property did not apply; Life did not mean pain.

Anger and hatred, when left unfed, bleed away like air from a punctured tire, over time and days and years. Forgiveness is stealth.

This is why I forgive, but I don’t forget. When you forget someone, the forgiveness doesn’t mean anything anymore.

You can’t rely on love. Love will let you down every time. Every. Single. Time. I don’t love Jecca. I don’t love Fanboy. But… God, the buts in life will kill you absolutely every time, won’t they. I don’t love. But I need. I can admit that to myself.

Sometimes hope could be the most frightening thing in the world.

I suddenly realize that I’m naked, which shouldn’t bother me since it’s the phone, but for some reason it does. “How’s it hanging?” Kyra asks and now I think I’m blushing. It’s just an expression, but jeez!

…She’s not buying [the lie], but there’s nothing else on the shelves.

See, forgiveness doesn’t happen all at once. It’s not an event – it’s a process.

And it’s true. It’s so true. All those years of loving Zik because he never asked about Eve… I never realized, I never understood. It was his job as my best friend not to ask. But it was my job as his best friend to tell him without being asked.

A river of images and thoughts and feelings, dirtied and polluted so that no one could drink from it without gagging.

. . . but there’s a restraining order in place.’ She speaks slowly, choosing her words carefully. ‘I’m not supposed to be this close to you.’ You were never supposed to be this close to me,’ I say, and I have no idea why.

In a certain sense, if I have an idea about you that I believe, I’ve degraded you. I’ve made you into something very small. This is the way of human beings, this is what we do to each other.

They know deep down that certain things in their lives are working or aren’t working, that certain parts of their lives are functional and others are dysfunctional. But sometimes, as human beings, we don’t want to know what’s not convenient. So we pretend not to know.

At a certain point we need to grow up; we need to look inside ourselves for our inner guidance. There are things most human beings know; they just don’t want to know them.

I’ve seen many films, and many beautiful films. And I try to keep a certain level of quality of my films. I don’t do commercials,

To have faith is to be sure of the things we hope for, to be certain of the things we cannot see.

One of the central lessons I have learned after a half century of working in the developing world is that the replacement of fear by hope is probably the single most powerful trampoline of progress.

When under the influence of certain (or some) reasons (or causes) (alcohol, war, etc – added Spir here) the low instincts are unbridled (or unrestrained).

I am a woman in the prime of my life, with certain powers and those powers severely limited by authorities whose faces I rarely see.