Like I've been sketched by an amateur artist: if you don't look too closely, it's all right, but start focusing and all the smudges and mistakes become really obvious.

For a moment, my heart aches for him. I should never have asked him to join me here; I should never have asked him to cross.

We should be protected from the people who will leave us in the end, from all the people who will disappear or forget us.

There were days I asked for it-prayed for it when I went to sleep. The belief that I would see you again, that I could find you-the hope for it-was the only thing that kept me going.

No wonder the regulators decided on segregation of boys and girls: Otherwise, it would have been a nightmare, this feeling angry and self-conscious and confused and annoyed all the time.

Droplets, droplets: we are all identical drips and drops of people, hovering, waiting to be tipped, waiting for someone to show us the way, to pour us down a path.

If he were less well trained, and less careful, he would say hate. But he can’t say it; it is too close to passion, and passion is too close to love, and love is amor deliria nervosa, the deadliest of all deadly things: It is the reason for the games of pretend, for the secret selves, for the spasms in the throat.