Sometimes what we avoid most is not pain but mystery.

Sometimes what we avoid most is not pain but mystery.

She’d decided that about eighty percent of what you believe about yourself when you’re twenty turns out to be wrong. The problem is you don’t know what your small true part is until much later.

Samuel thinks about Bethany the way other people maybe think about God. As in: How is God judging me?

Samuel thought how his father married to his mother was like a spoon married to a garbage disposal.

This was the price of hope, he realized, this shattering disappointment.

Because if you see people as enemies or obstacles or traps, you will be at constant war with them and with yourself. Whereas if you choose to see people as puzzles, and if you see yourself as a puzzle, then you will be constantly delighted, because eventually, if you dig deep enough into anybody, if you really look under the hood of someone’s life,

Any problem you face in a video game or in life is one of four things: an enemy, obstacle, puzzle, or trap. That’s it. Everyone you meet in life is one of those four things.”

smelled the aggressive, claustrophobic odor of institutionalized medicine: