If you were a mermaid, you said, If you were a mermaid, I was the sea.

I wish I wasn’t a girl who needed so much but a little free creature that slept in deserts and ran on clouds and lived on lilies.

I will not eat cakes or cookies or food. I will be thin, thin, pure. I will be pure and empty. Weight dropping off. Ninety-nine... ninety-five... ninety-two... ninety. Just one more to eighty-nine. Where does it go? Where in the universe does it go?

That was when I cut my arms with a razor blade as a means of creative expression. I only did it lightly, just grazing the skin, to see the way the blood would bleed out, to make myself look tougher. Not like some of those kids who keep going deeper and deeper, wondering what they look like down to the bone, because it's a world that's so close and yet so far and so dangerous and so much their own. The only world that is their own.

No matter how bad things get, you can always see the beauty in them. The worse things get, the more you have to make yourself see the magic in order to survive.

Each of us has a family tree full of stories inside of us, Dirk thought. Each of us has a story blossoming out of us.

I wanted to die, then. I wanted to destroy the body I was trapped in, become what she was, no matter what it took. No matter how much mutilation or pain. But he looked away, at me. He pulled my face down and pressed my lips against his like he was almost trying to suffocate us both.