Smith closed her speech by directly challenging Margaret Thatcher's famous aphorism that 'a man who beyond the age of twenty-six finds himself on a bus can count himself a failure' — a quote she found fascinating for its dark assumption that sharing a journey with another person is a form of personal denigration. She countered with the Roman playwright Terence's declaration, 'I am a human being. I consider nothing that is human alien to me' — words that Montaigne loved so much he had them carved into his ceiling beams. Smith called it not merely a statement of tolerance but a call to love. Her final image — of humans as each other's shelter, correction, and windows on the world — was a novelist's rebuttal to the philosophy of isolation.