I hated motorcycles. I said to my mother, 'I'll never get a motorcycle.' And she said, 'You never know what you'll want when you are older.' After that, the thing that scared me was not so much the motorcycle itself, but that I could turn into a person who would want one. I was scared of the idea that I could become an entirely different person, a stranger to myself.

I don't have the life of a famous person. But I do feel like I've been able to connect with a lot of people.

It was frustrating when people loved you and took an interest in you and sometimes worried about you and personally cared what you did with yourself. Lena wished that love were something you could flip on and off. You could turn it on when you felt good bout yourself and worthy of it and generous enough to return it. You could clip it off when you needed to hide or self-destruct and had nothing at all to give." (Lena, 194)

There was a moment in between, a moment flung free in the midst of the transition, when he made contact. That was the moment she would dwell on.

Gestating characters feels something like the mental equivalent of gestating a baby. In both cases, to create them you lose yourself. Or at least you reshape yourself to encompass them.

She existed in her friends; there she was. All the parts of herself she'd forgotten. She knew herself best when she was with them.

What can I say? I'm obsessed. And as we all know obsessed girls can't be held responsible for our actions.