Hate isn’t the most dangerous thing, he’d said. Indifference is.

....love and desire enjoy a symbiotic relationship, meaning that one cannot exist without the other. Desire is an enemy to contentment; desire is illness, a feverish brain. Who can be considered healthy who wants? The very word want suggests a lack, an impoverishment, and that is what desire is: an impoverishment of the brain, a flaw, a mistake.

Summer explodes into Portland. In early June the heat was there but not the color--the green were still pale and tentative, the morning had a biting coolness--but by the last week of school everything is Technicolor and splash, outrageous blue skies and purple thunderstorms and ink-black night skies and red flowers as brights as spots of blood.

This was what being cured was like: like being in a fishbowl, circling always inside the same glass.

He looked at me like I was beautiful.

He is my world and my world is him and without him there is no world.

I just want to be normal, like everybody else." "Are you sure that being like everybody else will make you happy?