We all stood and gathered our backpacks and I looked at the floor around my chair to make sure I hadn’t dropped anything. I was terrified of unwittingly leaving behind a scrap of paper on which were written all my private desires and humiliations. The fact that no such scrap of paper existed, that I did not even keep a diary or write letters except bland, earnest, falsely cheerful ones to my family (We lost to St. Francis in soccer, but I think we’ll win our game this Saturday; we are working on self-portraits in art class, and the hardest part for me is the nose) never decreased my fear.

I actually liked the disolation of winter; it was the season when it was okay to be unhappy. If I were to ever kill myself, I thought it would be in the summer.

I think in general, novels by men tend to be taken more seriously than novels by women.

There are so many people who are so much better qualified to write about politics than I am.

There's a lot that's not explained about the universe. And psychic-ness is not stranger than that.

It's never that hard for me to imagine what it must feel like to be someone else, whether it's an American teenage girl or a Japanese octogenarian man

I have this theory that the likeability question comes up so much more with female characters created by female authors than it does with male characters and male authors