When you say nasty things about people, you should never say the true ones, because you can't really fully and honestly take those back.

"And how are you feeling?" asked Patrick."Oh, I'm grand." Augustus Waters smiled with a corner of his mouth. "I'm on a roller coaster that only goes up, my friend."

The world is not a wish-granting factory.

I do my precalc homework, and then when I'm done I actually sit with the textbook for like three hours and try to understand what I just did. That's the kind of weekend it is--the kind where you have so much time you go past the answers and start looking into the ideas.

...It sounded like a dragon breathing in time with me, like I had this pet dragon who was cuddled up next to me and cared enough about me to time his breaths to mine.

"Nothing ever happens like you imagine it will," she says. The sky is like a monochromatic contemporary painting, drawing me in with its illusion of depth, pulling me up. "Yeah, that's true," I say. But then after I think about it for a second, I add, "But then again, if you don't imagine, nothing ever happens at all."

It took me a sleeve of Girl Scout Thin Mints and forty minutes to get over that boy.