If I were to draw on a paper what gym does for me, I would make one dot and then I would erase it.

I don't think men try to make women be like them, but I think women try to make men be like them, a lot.

I have wanted you to see out of my eyes so many times.

As far as I'm concerned, the most important thing you need when inventing characters is empathy.

It is never about how good your voice is; it is only about feeling the urge to sing, and then having the courage to do it with the voice you are given.

The heart of myself has always been something just wanting so bad. I have had an empty center, black as a basement, but also knowing about light and waiting. Young as I am, I know now that everything is about to come. Jimmy will be the place for me to learn the real happiness. He will be my Joy School. My joy. Mine.

In the classics section, she had picked up a copy of The Magic Mountain and recalled the summer between her junior and senior years of high school, when she read it, how she lay in bed hours after she should have gotten up, the sheet growing warmer against her skin as the sun rose higher in the sky, her mother poking her head in now and then to see if she'd gotten up yet, but never suggesting that she should: Eleanor didn't have many rules about child rearing, but one of them was this: Never interrupt reading.