I felt the unfairness of it, the inarguable injustice of loving someone who might have loved you back but can't due to deadness.

Wait, wait. I don't get it.' 'That is because you only have eight functioning brain cells.

But to be perfectly frank, this childish idea that the author of a novel has some special insight into the characters in the novel ... it's ridiculous. That novel was composed of scratches on a page, dear. The characters inhabiting it have no life outside of those scratches. What happened to them? They all ceased to exist the moment the novel ended.

I have a great affection for people who are intellectually engaged with the world, and who don't treat everything superficially. And I think, when people talk about nerdiness, what they're really talking about is smart people who who are trying to think hard about the world. And I don't think that's an insult, I think that's a great thing.

I felt tired for the first time, and I thought of us lying down on some grassy patch of SeaWorld together, me on my back and she on her side with her arm draped against me, her head on my shoulder, facing me. Not doing anything--just lying there together beneath the sky, the night here so well lit that it drowns out the stars. And maybe I could feel her breathe against my neck, and maybe we could just stay there until morning and then the people would walk past us as they came into the park, and they would see us and think that we were tourists, too, and we could just disappear into them.

Last words are always harder to remember when no one knows that someone's about to die.

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.