The consequences of being un-cool feel so big that a lot of times you end of not finding ways to have open and honest conversations.

It's a metaphor, see: You put the killing thing right between your teeth, but you don't give it the power to do its killing.

You could hear the wind in the leaves, and on that wind traveled the screams of the kids on the playground in the distance, the little kids figuring out how to be alive, how to navigate a world that was not built for them by navigating a playground that was. . . Who am I to say that these things might not be forever? Who is Pete Van Houten to assert as fact the conjecture that our labor is temporary? All I know of heaven and all I know of death is in this park: an elegant universe in ceaseless motion, teeming with ruined ruins and screaming children.

How do you just stop being terrified of getting left behind and ending up by yourself forever and not meaning anything to the world?

Well," Peter Van Houten said, extending his hand to me. "It is at any rate a pleasure to meet such ontologically improbable creatures." I shook his swollen hand, and then he shook hands with Augustus. I was wondering what ontologically meant. Regardless, I liked it. Augustus and I were together in the Improbable Creatures Club: us and duck-billed platypuses.

We all use the future to escape the present.

You're not a little kid anymore. You need to make friends, get out of the house, and live your life.