Live free or die. Four words. Thirteen letters. Ridges, bumps, swirls under my fingertips. Another story. We cling tightly to it, and our belief turns it to truth.

i suppose that's the secret, if you're ever wishing for things to back the way they were. You just have to look up.

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.

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. ... He has tipped us over, all of us in our teetering expectancy, and now we are pouring toward him, coursing on a wave of sound, of roaring shouts and applause. ... They are the moon; we are a tide, their tide, and under their direction we will wipe clean all the sickness and blight from the world.

people do terrible things, sometimes, for the best reasons.

The whole point of growing up is learning to stay on the laughing side.

There is only what you want and what happens. There is only grabbing on and holding tight in the darkness.