Whether or not you believe in Fate comes down to one thing: who do you blame when something goes wrong.

Writing is grunt work - you need to have self-motivation, perseverance, and faith... talent is the smallest part of it.

Suddenly, I don't want to be this person anymore. I don't want to pretend I'm fooling the world when I'm not. I want someone else to have a plan for me, because I'm not doing a very good job myself.

And just like that, something inside shifted very subtly, so that all the empty spaces in him suddenly disappeared, so that his breath timed to hers, so that his blood sang. This is why there was music, he realized. There were some feelings that just didn’t have words big enough to describe them.

it was possible to grow up in an instant, that you could look down and see the line in the sand dividing your life now from what it used to be.

Words got in the way. The things we felt the hardest--like what it was like to have a boy touch you as if you were made of light, or what it meant to be the only person in the room who wasn't noticed--weren't sentences; they were knots in the wood of our bodies, places where our blood flowed backward. If you asked me, not that anyone ever did, the only words worth saying were I'm sorry.

We all know that a sky with clouds in it is much more interesting than one that doesn’t have any.