I was a bit of a Victorian Lady, fainting-wise.

The way we still essentializ, we're constantly essentializing people as merely poor, or merely other, and in the end you can't have a relationship with people. I think the biggest job of adulthood is to learn to imagine other people complexly.

Osteosarcoma sometimes takes a limb to check you out. The, if it like you, it takes the rest.

You can't just make me different and then leave. You can't. You can't change me and make my whole life centered around you, then leave.

Augustus Waters died eight days after his prefuneral, at Memorial, in the ICU, when the cancer, which was made of him, finally stopped his heart, which was also made of him.

The town was paper, but the memories were not.

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.