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

How can someone have the power to shatter you to dust--and also to make you feel so whole?

Here's another thing to remember: hope keeps you alive. Even when you're dead, it's the only thing that keeps you alive.

It's funny, isn't it? When you are young you just want to be old, and then later you wish you could go back to being a kid.

Everything in me feels fluttering and free, like I could take off from the ground at any second. Music, I think, he makes me feel like music.

And then, just at that moment, when I'm no longer sure if I'm dreaming or awake or walking some valley in between where everything you wish for comes true, I feel the flutter of his lips on mine.

For the first time in my life I actually feel sorry for Carol. I'm only seventeen years old, and I already know something she doesn't know: I know that life isn't life if you just float through it. I know that the whole point- the only point- is to find things that matter, and hold on to them, and fight for them, and refuse to let them go.