With people you see in them what you already know.

Everyone here has the sense that right now is one of those moments when we are influencing the future.

Everyone learned to treat the future as fundamentally indefinite,

He was won over by their expressions, because he knew that the eyes of ordinary people were the best reflection of the level of civilization in a time and place.

And he realized that everyone was dreaming, but without awareness, without knowing what they really are.

Most people trusted in the future, assuming that their preferred version of it would unfold.

He betrayed the consciousness that he and his people had a past, if they dared but avow it, and might have a future, if they could but divine it.

Anyone who'd spent a childhood waiting for the other foot — or the other fist — to fall knew how to sense danger.

Even when they did not look at each other or speak to each other, he could feel a powerful current between them.

He knew at the same time that this stricture of acceptance (by which what we must love is made into what we can love) would eventually be a part of himself

It was funny how obsessed people believed others equally obsessed, or even interested.

He had that sense, or inward prophecy, — which a young man had better never have been born than not to have, and a mature man had better die at once than utterly to relinquish, — that we are not doomed to creep on forever in the old bad way, but that, this very now, there are harbingers abroad of a golden era, to be accomplished in his own lifetime.

The men who knew that he knew what he knew had found him

You have to notice people to be that sure about them.