High school is very intense for everyone. But at a boarding school, because you're there 24 hours a day, everything gets magnified.

She was the reason I was a reader, and being a reader was what had made me most myself; it had given me the gifts of curiosity and sympathy, an awareness of the world as an odd and vibrant contradictory place, and it had me unafraid of its oddness and vibrancy and contradictions.

I feel like if you read something, and it makes you so curious about a topic that you then go read something else, that's exciting.

I always worried someone would notice me, and then when no one did, I felt lonely.

I do think I was trying to entertain the reader more than I was trying to purge myself.

I had the fleeting thought then that we are each of us pathetic in one way or another, and the trick is to marry a person whose patheticness you can tolerate.

I just like to inhabit a character really deeply.