"Do not ever feel that you are superior to someone else. Because you are not." He sat down. He held out his finger to the whole class and shook it. "No one is superior to anyone else in this world."- P9
"Do you think there’s any free will in this world?" Artie had been serious; this was something he had been thinking about a lot lately, and his remark to Hoover was in response to the two men’s discussion of the mess in Ukraine after they had spoken about the mess in Israel and Gaza and then they had talked briefly of the upcoming presidential election and how divided was the country they lived in these days.- P14
"Reg used to say, ‘Each man is an island.’ "- P15
Artie’s secret was this: For more than two months, he had been thinking how to kill himself without his wife or son (or students) knowing that he had done so.- P16
All of us live with a huge blind spot before our eyes, meaning that no matter what we think we know we can never fully understand how we appear to others. This was true for Artie Dam.- P18
It was an accretion of loneliness; he understood this as he took off his rubber boots back in the garage.- P26
People die of loneliness. It happens all the time. And he thought: Yes, that was correct. People do die of loneliness, and I am—or will be—one of them.- P33
"People go through things," he said, looking back at her. "Your sads will come and go."- P35
And then Artie felt that he was inside a dark tunnel, and the tunnel was getting smaller, swirling around him faster and faster.- P42
As he thought about this, he understood: I did not want to die, I just did not want to live.- P46
The world was changing. Except that it was not.- P58
So blind we humans are—so blind. To each other and to ourselves, moving through life as though through shadows, putting out a hand in the dark and thinking we have touched someone. And maybe we have, as Artie did with Rhonda Lazarre that day. But mostly we travel through life unsighted, grasping only the smallest details of one another’s selves, including our own. Thinking all the while that we can see.- P59
