But if you consider all the unlikely things together, at least one of them will probably happen to each of us.

Nostalgia is inevitably a yearning for a past that never existed and when I'm writing, there are no bees to sting me out of my sentimentality. For me at least, fiction is the only way I can even begin to twist my lying memories into something true.

As far as all of our identities are dependent on how other people imagine us we are all making ourselves and each other up all the time

Peter Van Houten was the only person I’d ever come across who seemed to (a) understand what it’s like to be dying, and (b) not have died.

We need never be hopeless because we can never be irreperably broken.

I'm sorry," she says. I wheel around. "You know, you're a total know-it-all. And it's incredibly rude sometimes; I mean, you're not perfect either, and you act like it's my fault but it's not my fault for being quiet or your fault for being a know-it-all. It's not your problem or my problem; it's their problem. They're the demented ones, not us, so don't take it out on me, because the only thing that holds things together for me is having someone else on the Not Demented Team.

Idiotically, it occurred to me that my pink underwear didn’t match my purple bra, as if boys even notice such things.