I can see it. This one moment when you know you’re not a sad story. You’re alive. And you stand up and see the lights and the buildings and everything that makes you wonder. And you’re listening to that song in that drive with the people you love most in this world. And in this moment I swear… we are infinite.

I just wish that God or my parents or Sam or my sister or someone would just tell me what's wrong with me. Just tell me how to be different in a way that makes sense. To make this all go away.

When the police came, they found my brother asleep on the roof. Nobody knows how he got there.

And when she started becoming a “young lady,” and no one was allowed to look at her because she thought she was fat. And how she really wasn’t fat. And how she was actually very pretty. And how different her face looked when she realized boys thought she was pretty. And how different her face looked the first time she really liked a boy who was not on a poster on her wall. And how her face looked when she realized she was in love with that boy. I wondered how her face would look when she came out from behind those doors.

in the last month or so, i have read the great gatsby and a separate peace. i am starting to see a real trend in the kind of books bill gives me to read. and just like the tape of songs, it is amazing to hold each of them in the palm of my hand. they are all my favorites. all of them.

Part of the reason I wrote the book was I wanted to understand for myself why such good people let themselves get treated so badly.

And even if somebody else has it much worse, that doesn't really change the fact that you have what you have. Good and bad.