"Harper: In your experience of the world. How do people change?

Mormon Mother: Well it has something to do with God so it's not very nice.

God splits the skin with a jagged thumbnail from throat to belly and then plunges a huge filthy hand in, he grabs hold of your bloody tubes and they slip to evade his grasp but he squeezes hard, he insists, he pulls and pulls till all your innards are yanked out and the pain! We can't even talk about that. And then he stuffs them back, dirty, tangled and torn. It's up to you to do the stitching.

Harper: And then up you get. And walk around.

Mormon Mother: Just mangled guts pretending.

Harper: That's how people change. "
— Tony Kushner (Angels in America, Part Two: Perestroika)

"There is a reason the word belonging has a synonym for want at its center; it is the human condition."
— Jodi Picoult (Vanishing Acts)

"[I'll teach you] how not to leave the windows of your heart open when it looks like rain and how everyone has a stump where something necessary was amputated. "
— Steve Toltz (A Fraction of the Whole)

"People carry their secrets in hidden places, not on their faces. They carry suffering on their faces. Also bitterness if there’s room."
— Steve Toltz (A Fraction of the Whole)

"It was a miserable machine, an inefficient machine, she thought, the human apparatus for painting or for feeling; it always broke down at the critical moment; heroically, one must force it on."
— Virginia Woolf

"Living is a constant process of deciding what we are going to do.
"
— José Ortega y Gasset

"Life is made up of sobs, sniffles and smiles, with sniffles predominating.
"
— O. Henry

"If two people stare at each other for more than a few seconds, it means they are about to either make love or fight. Something similar might be said about human societies. If two nearby societies are in contact for any length of time, they will either trade or fight. The first is non-zero-sum social integration, and the second ultimately brings it."
— Robert Wright

"That's what the leadership was teaching me, day by day: that the self-interest I was supposed to be looking for extended well beyond the immediacy of issues, that beneath the small talk and sketchy biographies and received opinions, people carried with them some central explanation of themselves. Stories full of terror and wonder, studded with events that still haunted or inspired them. Sacred stories. "
— Barack Obama (Dreams from My Father)

"It is quite possible--overwhelmingly probable, one might guess--that we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology"
— Noam Chomsky