Isolation and belonging are not absolute, provable states of being. They arise completely out of the nothingness within you; you measure their dimensions against your own firm or shaky sense of who you are.

Rage keeps the person who feels it company. It moves into the hollows left by grief and loss, and turns inside you like a dark furred animal that grows and fills you; it kills off loneliness and takes its place.

Being strange is not necessarily bad ... Sometimes it's a person's only redeeming quality.

... although many people say it is a terrible onus to be labeled bad as a child, I thought that the opposite must be worse: If you knew early that you had wickedness in you, you could learn to accept it, if not to wrestle against it. But if you believed that you were essentially good, then when you finally found the ocean of evil in yourself, surely it would come as a terrible shock.

Isolation and belonging are not absolute, provable states of being. They arise completely out of the nothingness within you; you measure their dimensions against your own firm or shaky sense of who you are.

Not since Lord of the Flies has a novelist written with such perceptiveness about the potential for harm that lurks within the innocence of childhood.