Цитаты из книги The Answer is No!

Если вы хотите, чтобы нормальные люди за пять минут превратились в жаждущих власти диктаторов, все, что вам нужно сделать, это произнести волшебные слова: "Мы с удовольствием выслушаем ваши предложения!"

Но Лукас? Он просто счастлив. Это было даже не особенно сложно. Все, что он сделал, - это убрал то, что делает несчастными почти всех людей: других людей. Чего бы они ни хотели, ответ будет отрицательным.

The doctors and nurses understand very well that all the modern pills and treatments are surely great, but sometimes what people really need most of all is a prescription for a break.

If you ask people what they think, they start thinking, and that's how wars start.

If you want to see normal people turn into power-hungry dictators in five minutes, all you have to do is say the magic words: "We'd love to hear your suggestions!"

Lucas is happy. It's not as hard as one might think to become, the hard part is just to keep being it. It's hard because it's so easy to get in your head that if you are to be happy, you have to be happy exactly all of the time. And who in the world has the energy for that? Happiness can be exhausting. Honestly, it's most often enough to just not be the opposite.

Love isn't powerful enough. But spite? Spite can change the world.

Love is not to never fight. Love is always making up.

You can make yourself happy if you don't let others make you unhappy.

For a short moment, Lucas thinks that this strange feeling he is experiencing is a fever. Maybe he's coming down with a cold? But then he realizes it's something much, much worse. It's empathy.

But then again, Lucas has never loved a cat, so what does he really know about life?

Lucas stands quietly for a very, very long time, thinking about how awful it must feel: to be a person who so desperately wants something to happen.

I usually keep my peanuts next to a jar of peanut butter, so they understand what I'm capable of!

Because a funny thing about rule-loving people is that to them it seems more important to impose punishment than it is to actually solve problems, and a funny thing about rule-breaking people is that they seem to find breaking rules a lot easier to do if someone else has broken them first.

The woman in purple has been readying herself for the cruelest form of interpersonal terrorism: small talk.

Best to be like dill, Lucas has concluded. Not like basil, the most anxious and ingratiating herb, but also not like cilantro, that conflict-seeking lunatic. Be dill. Nobody cares about dill.

He works well in groups as long as it's groups of fewer than two people.

He's just happy. It wasn't even particularly difficult. All he did was to remove the one thing that makes almost all people unhappy: other people. Whatever they want, the answer is no.

Because people aren’t supposed to be happy, they’re only supposed to want to be happy, because how otherwise are you supposed to be able to sell things to them? More than anything people are supposed to pretend to be happy on the internet so that other people are reminded of how unhappy they themselves are by comparison. Humanity has a system.

– Думаете, весело, что кучка ненормальных протестует против меня? И весело, что кучка других ненормальных решили, что я ангел и подрались друг с другом? – спросил он. Женщина пожала плечами. – Не так уж и хорошо они дрались. В смысле, дрались тот, у которого непереносимость лактозы, с тем, у которого аллергия на глютен. Думаю, им было больнее от всех их газов, чем от кулаков.