Finally, I decided that the proper strategy was to stare back. Boys do not have a monopoly on the Staring Business, after all. So I looked him over and soon it was a staring contest. After a while the boy smiled, and then finally his blue eyes glanced away. When he looked back at me, I flicked my eyebrows up to say, I win. He shrugged

Scared isn't a good excuse. Scared is the excuse everyone has always used.

Collin Singleton could no more stay cool than a blue whale could stay skinny or Bangladesh could stay rich

Abligurition: an actual, if very obscure, English word, which means the spending of too much money on food.

She would stay on the road and in hiding, a balloon floating through the sky, eating up hundreds of miles a day with a help of the perpetual tailwind.

It is so hard to leave-until you leave.

Maybe we're grass—our roots so interdependent that no one is dead as long as someone is still alive.