Let’s just say, by the end of her second quarter Beli could walk down the hall without fear that anyone would crack on her. The downside of this of course was that she was completely alone.

But if these years have taught me anything it is this: you can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in.

If you didn't grow up like I did then you don't know, and if you don't know it's probably better you don't judge.

You can't regret the life you didn't lead.

She was the kind of girlfriend God gives you young, so you'll know loss the rest of your life.

Success, after all, loves a witness, but failure can't exist without one.

She would be a new person, she vowed. They said no matter how far a mule travels it can never come back a horse, but she would show them all.

Sucks to be left out of adolescence, sort of like getting locked in the closet on Venus when the sun appears for the first time in a hundred years.

...and when he thought about the way she laughed, as though she owned the air around her, his heart thundered inside his chest, a lonely rada.

A heart like mine, which never got any kind of affection growing up, is terrible above all things.

That was the September I cut school six times in my first two weeks. I just couldn't do school anymore. Something inside wouldn't let me.

Who can count the sand by the sea?

All authors go to heaven

It’s hard to see what’s good, what’s right, when you’re in the middle of it

I was extremely moved by the plight of Tsunami victims and I was inspired to try to make a difference.

We can't understand the universe in any clear way without the supernatural.

For ages, in my lunch hours, I would just go round and choreograph fight scenes. For fun. So now I'm very good at being thrown around. I bounce, in the words of my friends.

I'm caught up probably just as much in the consumer culture as the next person.

The writer has to force himself to work. He has to make his own hours and if he doesn't go to his desk at all there is nobody to scold him.

Writing is a form of mischief.

Nothing shows our weakness more than to be so sharp-sighted at spying other men's faults, and so purblind about our own.