Each step is more difficult than the last; the heaviness fills me and turns my limbs to stone. You must hurt or be hurt.

Most people don't want to be saved. Besides, if you keep bailing everybody out, they'll never learn to paddle on their own.

People are like houses. They could open their doors. You could walk through their rooms and touch the objects hidden in their corners. But something--the structure, the wiring, the invisible mechanism that kept the whole thing standing--remai ned invisible, suggested only by the fact of its existing at all.

I've learned to get really good at this - say one thing when I'm thinking about something else, act like I'm listening when I'm not, pretend to be calm and happy when I'm really freaking out. It's one of the skills you perfect as you get older

I hate both of my parents right now: for sitting quietly in our house, while out in the darkness my heart was beating away all of the seconds of my life, ticking them off one by one until my time was up; for letting the thread between us stretch so far and so thin that the moment it was severed for good they didn't even feel it.

Alex is dead, do you hear me? All of that-what we felt, what it meant- that's done now, okay? Buried. Blown away.

You can try to pin me down with a hundred thousand arms, but I will find a way to resist