My father had a thing he used to say to us when we were growing up, and it is so simple: ‘Everybody, one at a time.’ He explained that the idea was not to make any assumptions about the people we would come into contact with in our lives — not to believe or be influenced by the stereotypes and prejudices of life in the world, but to see each person first as an individual someone: everybody, one at a time.

Richard Bausch, Why Literature Can Save Us
(via powells)