When you showed someone how you felt, it was fresh and honest. When you told someone how you felt, there might be nothing behind the words but habit or expectation. Those three words were what everyone used; simple syllables couldn't contain something as rare as what I felt for Sean. I wanted him to feel what I felt when I was with him: that incredible combination of comfort, decadence, and wonder; the knowledge that, with just a single taste of him, I was addicted.

Until this moment, I had not realized that someone could break your heart twice, along the very same fault lines.

As an American I wanted to explore... why are we the only first world country that still has capital punishment? Is it because we're too afraid to really examine the system, or is it because we really truly believe that this is the best way to deter future crime?

I try really hard to ask people to take a look at their bookshelves. Are there female writers on it? Gay writers? Writers of color? There should be.

People changed. Even the people you thought you knew as well as you knew yourself.

I am an activist. I have a really big pulpit with my fiction and I love knowing that I can make people think.

Gay teenagers are four times as likely to attempt suicide as straight ones. I wish they knew that there's nothing wrong with them; that they are just a different shade of normal.