Nobody likes me,” he concluded at the tail end of a ten-minute pity fest. “Can’t imagine why,” Quinn murmured. I turned my snort of laughter into a fake cough, which was an embarrassingly feeble attempt at subterfuge when you consider the fact that I didn’t have any lungs.

For me, the teen years were all about searching for a place for myself, wondering why I seemed so different than everyone else, wondering especially why no one could look past the surface and figure out who I really was underneath.

Full Disclosure: I hate David with the passion of a thousand fiery suns all going to supernova at the same time

I longed to return to that bloody riverbank, to throw myself in the path of the final arrow, to die ignorant, and so, in love. Better to be killed by an arrow than by the words of the one I most trusted.

In dreams you can become everything you're not. You can reverse the most fundamental truths of your life. You can taste death, the ultimate opposite.

I believed in happily ever after as much as anyone, because Jane Austen, Prince Charming, and Hugh Grant promised me it could happen. But maybe that particular delusion was universal.

They ask how the universe is arranged, philosophers, mathematicians, and they draw pretty pictures, impossibilities on the page. They save phenomena by telling one ugly lie after another, epicycles upon epicycles, and the fools care not. It is not enough, I tell you, to ask how the cosmos is designed. We must ask why.