Sarte was right, Hell is other people

Her forehead was a maze of anxious little grooves, from a lifetime of wondering about whether everyone within range was OK.

I wasn't sure I could make it through another hour of his company without throwing my stapler at his head.

You start admiring someone who's famous for actually doing something---imagine that---and I swear to you I will buy you every item in her entire wardrobe. But over my own dead body will I spend my own time and money turning you into a clone of some brain-dead waste of skin who thinks the pinnacle of achievement is selling her wedding shots to a magazine.

I had been right: freedom smelled like ozone and thunderstorms and gunpowder all at once, like snow and bonfires and cut grass, it tasted like seawater and oranges.

I can't explain the alchemy that transmuted one evening into the equivalent of years held lightly in common. The only way I can put it is that we recognized, too surely even for surprise, that we shared the same currency.

I had learned early to assume something dark and lethal hidden at the heart of anything I loved. When I couldn't find it, I responded, bewildered and wary, in the only way I knew how: by planting it there myself.