Everyone you trust, everyone you think you can count on, will eventually disappoint you.

I feel a flash of grief so intense it almost makes me cry out: not for what I lost, but for the chances I missed.

People need other people to feel things for them," she said. "It gets lonely to feel things all by yourself.

I hate both of my parents right now: for sitting quietly in our house, while out in the darkness my heart was beating away all of the seconds of my life, ticking them off one by one until my time was up; for letting the thread between us stretch so far and so thin that the moment it was severed for good they didn't even feel it.

It won't matter if nobody ever thinks I'm pretty (although sometimes I wish, just for a second, that somebody would)

I’m Hana,” Hana says. “And this is Lena.” She jabs me with an elbow. I know I must look like a fish, standing there with my mouth gaping open, but I’m too outraged to speak. He’s lying. I know he’s the one I saw yesterday, would bet my life on it. “Alex. Nice to meet you.” Alex keeps his eyes on me as he and Hana shake hands. Then he extends a hand to me. “Lena,” he says thoughtfully. “I’ve never heard that name before.

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