My heart is really pounding," I said. "That's how you know you're having fun," Margo said.

Also, I feel that crying is almost--like, aside from deaths of relatives or whatever-- totally avoidable if you follow two very simple rules: 1.Don't care too much. 2. Shut up. Everything unfortunate that has ever happened to me has stemmed from failure to follow one of the rules.

How strange and how lovely it is to be anything at all.

And then it was the kind of dark your eyes never adjust to.

Who would you die for? Who would you wake up at five forty-five in the morning for even though you don't even know why he needs you?

I don't know where people got the idea that characters in books are supposed to be likable. Books are not in the business of creating merely likeable characters with whom you can have some simple identification with. Books are in the business of creating great stories that make you're brain go ahhbdgbdmerhbergurhbudgerbudbaaarr.

They were angry, I thought. Horrified. These teenagers, with their hormones, making out beneath a video broadcasting the shattered voice of a former father.