When you are a kid you have your own language, and unlike French or Spanish or whatever you start learning in fourth grade, this one you are born with, and eventually lose...Kids think with their brains cracked wide open; becoming an adult...is only a slow sewing it shut.

His hand is cool on my cheek as he paints a tear beneath my left eye, dark blue and swollen with sorrow.

If he says jump, she doesn't even ask "How high?" She goes out and buys a pogo stick.

Saying goodbye to the people you love isn't easy

and he suddenly knew that if she killed herself, he would die. Maybe not immediately, maybe not with the same blinding rush of pain, but it would happen. You couldn't live for very long without a heart.

[Jules] slides into a seat beside me with her hot lunch tray, sighing. “Four hours, thirty-six minutes, and twelve seconds till we’re out of purgatory for the weekend.” “Maybe later,” I murmur, still distracted by the day’s previous events. “So, let me show you how a conversation works. I say something, and then you say something back that actually relates to what I was talking about, as if you were even the least bit interested.” “Huh?” I say.

I have always written about subjects that engage me - questions I can't answer myself. They apparently tend to be big moral and ethical issues!