Were she better or you sicker, then the stars would not be so terribly crossed, but it is the nature of the stars to cross.

If my public existence does anything worthwhile, hopefully it at least demystifies the author a bit, because I know when I was younger I felt like authors were like wizards or something. Turns out they're total muggles.

Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia. (...) You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.

That is, to me at least, one of the most helpful and useful things books do for us: They are generous enough to allow us to choose what matters to us.

what i really want - and what i never get - is to be appreciated. do you know what it’s like to work so hard to make sure everyone’s happy, and to have not a single person recognize it

What can we do?" Mom asked again. I shrugged. But she kept asking, as if there were something she could do, until I just kind of crawled across the couch into her lap and my dad came over and held my legs really tight and I wrapped my arms all the way around my mom's middle and they held on to me for hours while the tide rolled in.

But you know what they say about Gutshot: the population never goes up and never goes down, because every time a woman gets pregnant, a man leaves town.