“Love is just another means of manipulation. We can use that emotion like we use hatred and fear.”

“But many of us seek community solely to escape the fear of being alone. Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.”

“We are fated to love one another; we hardly exist outside our love, we are just animals without it, with a birth and a death and constant fear between. Our love has lifted us up, out of the dreadfulness of merely living.”

“Call us old-fashioned, but we think that we ought to avoid doing precisely what our enemies want us to do. They want us to elevate them, to give in to fear, to indulge in hatred, to eye one another with suspicion and to take leave of our faculties”

“We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.”

“To be manipulative is to speak and act in a way that guarantees that we get the response we want to get from other people. So you see, manipulation is how most of us try to get love. Manipulation is how most of us try to get safety… because we do not trust the world to be kind to us. Everyone is manipulative, we are simply more or less aware of that aspect within ourselves.”

“No one and nothing can harm us, child, except what we fear and love.”

“We are not trapped or locked up in these bones. No, no. We are free to change. And love changes us. And if we can love one another, we can break open the sky.”

“No one can persuade another to change. Each of us guards a gate of change that can only be opened from the inside. We cannot open the gate of another, either by argument or by emotional appeal.”

“Just because someone isn’t willing or able to love us, it doesn’t mean that we are unlovable.”