Surely that was why faith had been invented: to raise teenagers without dying. Although of course it was also why death was invented: to escape teenagers altogether.

I had never feared insomnia before--like prison, wouldn't it just give you more time to read?

You know, I'm just a very boring, not very funny person in person. I don't feel pressured to be otherwise.

She smiled at him, with longing. 'Where do you live,' she asked, 'and how do I get there?

Usually she ordered a cup of coffee and a cup of tea, as well as a brownie, propping up her sadness with chocolate and caffeine so that it became an anxiety.

For love to last, you had to have illusions or have no illusions at all. But you had to stick to one or the other. It was the switching back and forth that endangered things.

She hadn't been given the proper tools to make a real life with, she decided, that was it. She'd been given a can of gravy and a hairbrush and told, "There you go." -- Willing