I need to figure out the secret. I need to work out how to keep things flying back to me instead of always flying away.

Nothing had changed. I was the stupid one again. I was the girl who never understood who she was to people.

My mother gave me a disappointed look. Then I gave her one back. Mine was for everything, not just the sandwich.

I stared hard, trying to find a pattern. Thinking if I kept looking hard enough, maybe the pieces of the world would fit back together into something I could understand.

You could try to believe what you wanted, but it never worked. Your brain and your heart decided what you were going to believe and that was that. Whether you liked it or not.

It's hard to do that, to decide to believe one thing over another.

That's the difference between you and Greta. She has better things to do. She gets involved in clubs, activities. She has friends. But you? You slump around in that room of yours--

It's the most unhappy people who want to stay alive, because they think they haven't done everything they want to do. They think they haven't had enough time. They feel they've been shortchanged.

I suppose I'm in that very small group of people who are not waiting for their own story to unfold. If my life was a film, I'd have walked out by now.

But you don't know what it was like. It was just the two of us that afternoon, and then . . . and then it was just me.

...I felt the wall between the world of secrets and the real world start to collapse. I felt the girls from the portrait becoming us and us becoming them...

If you can’t save your own life, is it even worth saving?

At this point in my life, beaming confidence is largely a matter of mind over bladder control

HER BARBED-WIRE SMILELIFTED YOU TO HEAVENBUT I HAVE TO ASKDID GOD LOOK LIKE HER VOICE

My mother always tells me that anyone who gets enjoyment from other people's misery will eventually get the greatest discomfort from his or her own miseries.

Anything plus management amounts to success

The nobler sort of man emphasizes the good qualities in others, and does not accentuate the bad. The inferior does.

Everything depends on the value we give to things. We are the ones who make morality and virtue. The cannibal who eats his neighbor is as innocent as the child who sucks his barley-sugar.

I never would have agreed to the formulation of the Central Intelligence Agency back in forty-seven, if I had known it would become the American Gestapo.

I think graffiti is part of Berlin culture. You think about what the Berlin wall meant and how visible that was in everyone's life. How it was a part of their very identity.

More was revealed in a human face than a human being can bear face to face.