He missed her like crazycakes.

The future lay before him, inevitable but invisible.

Imagining isn't perfect. You can't get all the way inside someone else...But imagining being someone else, or the world being something else, is the only way in. It is the machine that kills fascists.

It is easy to forget how full the world is of people, full to bursting, and each of them imaginable and consistently misimagined.

I’ve always sort of preferred people who are not entirely likable.

Tiny Cooper is splayed out across the thin carpet, using his backpack as a pillow. He’s wearing skinny jeans, which look very much like denim sausage casings.

Of course I tensed up when he touched me. To be with him was to hurt him-inevitably. And that's what I'd felt as he reached for me: I'd felt as though I were committing an act of violence against him, because I was.