The words feel as good as any hug I've even gotten.

​

That's the problem. We let people say stuff, and they say it so much that it becomes okay to them and normal for us. What's the point of having a voice if you're gonna be silent in those moments you shouldn't be?

​

At an early age I learned that people make mistakes, and you have to decide if their mistakes are bigger than your love for them.

The sound of her name turned her face an unnatural shade of blank.

​

Spending the entirety of the a night in a small, dark space ruins all understanding of time...Air rebreathed is made of less and less air until you feel like you're choking on your own spit.

The fact that I'm magic with a good piece of lathed ash in my hands makes me tolerable. 

​

What happened next is pure magic, and is for us and us alone.

If only world leaders would get laid well and regularly the world's problems might disappear.

​

I want to get away from these kids who never did anything to anyone except to be born with different brains and different wiring...I want to get away from the stigma they all clearly feel just because they have an illness of the mind as opposed to, say, an illness of the lungs or blood.

"Nice is the white bread of the English language adjective box. It's tasteless, bland and forgettable. When you speak, when you write," she says with the air of a fire-and-brimstone preacher, "I want you to do it multi-grain."

I think about the Thing We Don't Talk About, and wonder if it could be happening again. Emma sees a therapist once a week, and I try to convince myself that if something was wrong, her therapist would know and make everything better. But I'm not sure it's that simple. I mean, I know it's not.

​

"She's still not really herself," I say. "It's like, in losing all that weight, she also lost who she really is. I feel like I don't know her. Like Emma is gone, and there's this stranger living in her body. It's like..." I swallow the hurt rising up in my throat. "It's like she died," I say quietly. "Or at least part of her died." 

Every time another group became equal to straight white guys it made Mr. Davis feel like he had that much power...when the truth was he never should've had so much power in the first place.

​

...the ultimate measure of a man: how he acts when he's wrong but knows he can get away with it anyway.

...sometimes you see someone and there's just this flicker.  Like a light bulb that glows around a person, making them shine brighter than all the others.

What happens when being selfless takes away a big part of your self? 

A plan is the thing that goes unsaid, but puts the hope in your voice nonetheless. 

​

All along you've used the first sentence as a lock. But now you find that it's the key.

Again, no quote, but totally fun. A shape-shifting pushy sidekick to an evil genius who is in a gay love affair with the dashing hero. 

I haven't thought about her in an eon. But I miss her now. Just because she's here.
 

Things you learn in church that are hammered into you until they're so normal that you expect everyone else who doesn't go to church to know what you mean.
 

Every time another group became equal to straight white white guys, it made Mr. Davis feel like he had that much less power...when the truth was that he never should've had so much power in the first place.
 

I don't actually have a quote from this one, but it's a GREAT book. Not lyrical, but clear, concise writing, interesting characters, and great world building.

 ...she supposed that if she lived her life properly then by the time it was over she'd know what was in it. That was sort of the whole point, wasn't it? To understand your own story? Reading the book [of her life] now would just be cheating. And what kind of jackass cheated at life?

​

I was realizing for the first time what a small part of my parent's world I was. They were everything to me, but I wasn't everything to them. 

I guess this is how every girl in the history of the sexes has been played. Because the rules apply to every situation but your own.

 You bring up race stuff with white people and either they get awkward and defensive and want to tell you why you've misunderstood them, or else they want you to drop everything and teach a college seminar for them, and either way it's exhausting.

 My heart sank back to my chest; muscles I hadn't realized I'd kept clenched for two years loosened as I handed the weight of Oliver over to him.

I'm asking for simplicity, for purity and ease of choice and no pressure. I'm asking for something that no politics is going to provide, something that probably you only get in preschool. I'm asking for preschool.

Part of not being a self-centered asshole, Colin reasoned, is doing things with your friend even if you don't want to.

But there was something so familiar about the way Blue described the feeling...like the way you can memorize someone's gestures but never know their thoughts. And the feeling that people are like houses with vast rooms and tiny windows.

​

There's no such thing as a good idea when you're in seventh grade.

This is exactly the sort of dumb way a stoner would try to kill someone. By fatally hugging them. What is up with stoners? Drugs are asinine.

​

What is hummus, exactly? It's basically a paste. Who eats paste?

I swallow my sadness as hard as I can. It only makes it halfway down my throat.

​

...he smiles at me, just a glancing faint thing before he turns back to Tommy. I'm quite happy for the smile, because Dad told me once you should be grateful for the gifts that are the rarest.

Surely that was a trick of the eye or the mind or the fact that Petey Willis was warm against him and smelled like a million things you'd want to eat and this was jumbling his thoughts, confusing him, making it hard to pay attention to anything but her.

​

She took her time with every bone, every strap of muscle and thread of sinew her fingers could find, mapping the landscape of him.

I decided I wanted to read all the books by Ernest Hemingway. My father decided he would read everything that I read. Maybe that was our way of talking.

Sometimes you do things and you do them not because you're thinking but because you're feeling. Because you're feeling too much. And you can't always control the things you do when you're feeling too much.

[My great-grandmother] looked out the window her whole life, the way so many sit their sadness on an elbow. I wonder if she made the best with what she got or was she sorry because she couldn't be all the things she wanted to be. Esperanza. I have inherited her name, but I don't want to inherit her place by the window.

Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.