Hey, and for what it's worth? Friends don't leave you alone in the woods. Friends are the ones who come and take you out.

Maybe it was just part of growing up with someone. Once you have a rhythm and stay with it long enough, it's not hard to find again.

n the dark everyone felt the same: the edges blurred. When I think of myself then, what I was like two years ago, I feel like a wound in a bad place, prone to be bumped on corners or edges. Never able to heal.

I've found in my own life that if my writing isn't going well, not much else will. It is the one constant, the key to everything else.

Whenever you made a choice, especially one you'd been resisting, it always affected everything else, some in big ways, like a tremor beneath your feet, others in so tiny a shift you hardly noticed a change at all. But it was happening.

You're not a sucker. You're just nice. You give people the benefit of the doubt.

It's the same thing,' I told her. 'What is?' 'Being afraid and being alive.' 'No,' she said slowly, and now it was as if she was speaking a language she knew at first I wouldn't understand, the very words, not to mention the concept, being foreign to me. 'Macy, no. It's not.