The Humanity Project Quotes

“You wanted to believe that getting older, growing up, would change everything, transform you into the amazing person you were meant to be. But what if it didn't? What if you had to stay you forever?”
― Jean Thompson, The Humanity Project

“We were afraid of so many things: Of our children, who lived in their own world of casually lurid pleasures, zombies and cartoon killers and thuggish music. Of our neighbors, who were buying gold and ammunition and great quantities of freeze-dried food, and who were organizing themselves into angry tribes recognizable to one another by bumper stickers.”
― Jean Thompson, The Humanity Project

“The problem with women was that they were always planning some future that involved you and that you were not aware of, as if you’d signed up for a credit card without knowing it.”
― Jean Thompson, The Humanity Project

“Nobody knows what to do when there’s a tragedy. Nobody practices for it.”
― Jean Thompson, The Humanity Project

“What a lopsided stumpy mess people made of a family tree these days. The last thing any of them needed was some new little sprig grafted on.”
― Jean Thompson, The Humanity Project

“Somehow, television made behavior that you would go out of your way to avoid in real life into something fascinating.”
― Jean Thompson, The Humanity Project

“Conner thought he understood how pride could back up in somebody, get turned around and come out as meanness. But that didn’t make it any easier to put up with.”
― Jean Thompson, The Humanity Project

“He was trying to decide if she was pretty. If you had to think about it, he guessed the answer was no.”
― Jean Thompson, The Humanity Project

“He was beginning to see how having a teenager might be the equivalent of having a bad class in permanent session.”
― Jean Thompson, The Humanity Project

“She didn’t look like Louise. She didn’t look much like anybody except herself.”
― Jean Thompson, The Humanity Project

“Maybe getting to know a child wasn't entirely unlike meditation. You kept going at it from all different angles, and once in a while something clicked.”
― Jean Thompson, The Humanity Project

“Head full of beer, fists jammed into his empty pockets, halos of blur around the parking lot lights, yup, one more wasted evening, and even though you wanted to believe you had an infinite supply of evenings available for wasting, you didn’t.”
― Jean Thompson, The Humanity Project

“His heart cracked open and flooded all the space around it.”
― Jean Thompson, The Humanity Project

“Did poverty in itself lead to moral failings, such as crime? Was "goodness" something that could be objectified and measured? Did society benefit directly from individual virtue, and therefore have incentive to promote it? Did our concepts of goodness have their foundations in religious and spiritual practice? What about the notion that money was the root of all evil, and those monks and nuns who felt it necessary to deny themselves material wealth?”
― Jean Thompson, The Humanity Project