I Consider A Good Dinner Party At

The Notion Is That Human Beings Are Born, (as My Guru Has Explained Many Times,) With Equivalent Potential For Both Contraction And Expansion. The Ingredients Of Both Darkness And Light Are Equally Present In All Of Us, And Then It's Up To The Individual (or The Family, Or The Society) To Decide What Will Be Brought Forth - The Virtues Or The Malevolence. The Madness Of This Planet Is Largely A Result Of Human Being's Difficulty In Coming Into Virtuous Balance With Himself. Lunacy (both Collective And Individual) Results.

The Story He [todd Willingham] Told Me Was This: He Woke Up To A Fire. He Ran Out Of The House And Couldn't Run Back In To Save His Children, And That Was Enough To Get Me Interested. ... There's A Writer In Me That's Like, ... This Is A Great Story. ... I Have A Good Friend, Who Was My Neighbor At The Time, And I Told Her About It. ... She Had Been A Reporter, And She Was Like, "let's Go Investigate It."

That’s The Thing About A Human Life-there’s No Control Group, No Way To Ever Know How Any Of Us Would Have Turned Out If Any Variables Had Been Changed.

Our Relationship Now Thoroughly Ruined, With Even Civility Destroyed Between Us, All I Wanted Anymore Was The Door.

This Is What Intimacy Does To Us Over Time. That's What A Long Marriage Can Do: It Causes Us To Inherit And Trade Each Other's Stories. (p.237)