She did not need to fold into herself and self-destruct. Those awful things are survivable, because we are as indestructible as we believe ourselves to be. When adults say, "Teenagers think the hate invincible," with that sly, stupid smile on their faces, they don't know how right they are. We need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken.

It's so easy to get stuck. You just get caught in being something, being special or cool or whatever, to the point where you don't even know why you need it; you just think you do.

I even tried to tell myself to live my best life today.

The rules of capitalization are so unfair to words in the middle of a sentence.

People talk about the courage of cancer patients, and I do not deny that courage. I had been poked and stabbed and poisoned for years, and still I trod on. But make no mistake: In that moment, I would have been very, very happy to die.

All good American literature is always interested in people who are ambiguously heroic, like Gatsby.

It's hard to believe in coincidence, but it's even harder to believe in anything else.