One of the biggest lessons of my life, Krista, has been that we can’t separate the world into monsters and angels and that there’s nothing like loving people and knowing friends who played different roles in the genocide, including being perpetrators, that makes you have to confront that most raw element of what it means to be human. And the only conclusion I could make was that there are monsters and angels in each of us and that those monsters really are our broken parts — they’re our insecurities; they’re our fears; they’re our shames — and that in times of insecurity, it becomes really easy for demagogues to prey on those broken parts and sometimes make us do terrible things to each other.

consciousness is the “I am-ness” of life. We can only say, “I am,” because of consciousness. And without consciousness, we wouldn’t exist.

we’re just bags of water with the capacity to reason and spiritual callings.

In our lives, we do our best to serve our community well, behave decently, and treat people well.

Saying something dumb on Twitter and getting yelled at by thousands of strangers. Also, catastrophic climate change.

I was 13 when this book came out in your country in 1981, and I fell in love with it. It’s one of the books that made me love puzzles.

So words are my true love. But I grew to love all these other genres, including jigsaws, which I was very snobby about and looked down on. I was, ‘They’re not real puzzles.’ But I am a reformed jigsaw skeptic. I can officially say I am now a jigsaw lover.

That is a lesson I try to take to real life. What is the real problem? Don’t just dive in and start trying to go with your first instinct. Step back and say, ‘What am I really trying to accomplish here?’

Being willing to listen to my ideas and tell me when they are good and when they are dumb.

I like to watch Netflix on double-speed. My wife says it ruins movies, but I love being able to watch twice as many movies in the same amount of time. And sometimes it doesn’t even feel rushed. I recently watched “Manchester by the Sea” on double-speed. I kind of wanted triple-speed for that one. I can’t imagine watching that in normal time.