But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defensless that I couldn't do it. It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn't in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get." I know what she's talking about. The something deeper and more secret. It's like cracks inside of you. Like there are these fault lines where things don't meet up right.

And yet still I worried. I like being a person. I wanted to keep at it. Worry is yet another side effect of dying.

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.

The world is not a wish-granting factory.

True love will triumph in the end—which may or may not be a lie, but if it is a lie, it's the most beautiful lie we have.

That didn’t happen, of course. Things never happened the way I imagined them.

I want to minimize the deaths I am responsible for.