Caring doesn't sometimes lead to misery. It always does.

A taste so profound and complex that it can't even be compared to other tastes, only to emotions. Cheesy waffles, I was thinking, tastes like love without the fear of love's dissolution.

That's how writing works, at least for me: even the stuff that doesn't work out gets funneled into the stuff that does work out.

It is not my fault that my parents own the world's largest collection of black Santas.

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

The Side Effects of Dying in Your Pants isn't really funny… Alright, it's a little funny.

She said, "It's not life or death, the labyrinth." "Um, okay. So what is it?" "Suffering," she said. "Doing wrong and having wrong things happen to you. That's the problem. Bolivar was talking about the pain, not about the living or dying. How do you get out of the labyrinth of suffering?... Nothing's wrong. But there's always suffering, Pudge. Homework or malaria or having a boyfriend who lives far away when there's a good-looking boy lying next to you. Suffering is universal. It's the one thing Buddhists, Christians, and Muslims are all worried about."