That’s just the kind of thing that kids do to each other. It’s no big deal. There’s always going to be a person laughing and somebody getting laughed at. It happens every day, in every school, in every town in America—probably in the world, for all I know. The whole point of growing up is learning to stay on the laughing side.

You came form different starts and you'll come to different ends.

I'm not scared, if that's what you're wondering. The moment of death is full of sound and warmth and light shooting away, arcing up and up and up, and if singing were a feeling it would be this, this light, this lifting, like laughing... The rest you have to find out for yourself.

I'm used to a feeling of doubleness, of thinking one thing and having to do another, a constant tug-of-war.

I’m not the Hana everyone told me I would be after my cure.

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.

It is a ruined-world, a nonsense-place.