My friends say I have two speeds: fast and blistering.

All teenagers knew this was true. The process of growing up was nothing more than figuring out what doors hadn't yet been slammed in your face. For years, parents tell you that you can be anything, have anything, do anything. That was why she'd been so eager to grow up-until she got to adolescence and hit a big fat wall ofreality. As it turned out, she couldn't have anything she wanted. You didn't get to be pretty or smart or popular just because you wanted it. You didn't control your own destiny, you were too busy trying to fit in.

He knew that there was a difference between something that makes you happy and something that doesn’t make you unhappy. The trick was convincing yourself these were one and the same.

The way I challenge myself is by writing something that really engages me, that doesn't have an easy answer, and isn't always an easy book to write.

It's certainly my honor to be able to, hopefully, change the world a tiny bit, one mind at a time.

There are legions of us, I realized. The mothers who have broken babies, and spend the rest of our lives wondering if we should have spared them. And the mothers who have let their broken babies go, who look at our children and see instead the faces of the ones they never met.

The jury is supposed to be twelve peers, but technically that would mean every single person on the jury should have Asperger's syndrome, because then they'd really understand me.