Please understand. Please forgive me. I prayed every day for you to be alive, until hope became painful. Don't hate me. I still love you.

They haven't killed us yet," I say, and I imagine that one day I will fly a plane over Portland, over Rochester, over every fenced-in city in the whole country, and I will bomb and bomb and bomb, and watch all their buildings smoldering to dust, and all those people melting and bleeding into flame, and I will see how they like it. If you take, we will take back. Steal from us, and we will rob you blind. When you squeeze, we will hit. This is the way the world is made now.

One of the strangest things about life is that it will chug on, blind and oblivious, even as your private world - your little carved-out sphere - is twisting and morphing, even breaking apart.

Feelings aren't forever. Time waits for no one, but progress waits for man to enact it.

It's like high school holds two different worlds, revolving around each other an never touching; the haves and the have-nots. I guess it's a good thing. High school is supposed to prepare you for the real world, after all.

We're on the other side of the fence now, Lena,' she says, tiredly, as she passes. "Don't you get it? You can't tell me what to feel.

It won't matter if nobody ever thinks I'm pretty (although sometimes I wish, just for a second, that somebody would)