I screamed until my voice dried up in my throat. We all did. All of us in Ward Six, all of us forgotten, left to rot.

People are like ants: Just a few of them give all the orders. And most of them spend their lives getting squashed.

If you’re smart, you care. And if you care, you love.

Most things, even the greatest movements on earth, have their beginnings in something small. An earthquake that shatters a city might begin with a tremble, a breath. Music begins with a vibration . . . And God created the whole universe from an atom no bigger than a thought.

That's the easy thing about falling: there is only one choice after that.

Love obeys no laws other than its own.

They couldn’t have known that even this was a lie—that we never really choose, not entirely. We are always being pushed and squeezed down one road or another. We have no choice but to step forward, and then step forward again, and then step forward again; suddenly we find ourselves on a road we haven’t chosen at all. But maybe happiness isn’t in the choosing. Maybe it’s in the fiction, in the pretending: that wherever we have ended up is where we intended to be all along.