He made me think of all the books I hadn't read, and all the ones I'd read but hadn't fully understood.

Meg was going to have to learn for herself what Laurie had figured out over the summer - that it was better to leave well enough alone, to avoid unnecessary encounters with the people you'd left behind, to not keep poking at that sore tooth with the tip of your tongue. Not because you didn't love them anymore, but because you did, and because that love was useless now, just another dull ache in your phantom limb.

After all, what was adult life but one moment of weakness piled on top of another? Most people just fell in line like obedient little children, doing exactly what society expected of them at any given moment, all the while pretending that they’d actually made some sort of choice.

I did a lot of reading of the Bible and became fascinated with the idea of the Rapture. It's pretty wild. I hadn't heard of it until I was in college.

Apparently even the most awful tragedies, and the people they'd ruined, got a little stale after a while.

There's not some finite amount of pain inside us. Our bodies and minds just keep manufacturing more of it.

It just so happened that for most of my life I've lived in the suburbs.