Then I kissed Max because I loved him, and everyone I had ever loved before had gone away and I had never kissed them goodbye.

You might think what I tell you next is all a dream, or that I've imagined it. I can't help it if that's what you think, but I swear it's true. Sometimes the truest things are the hardest to believe.

Sometimes I can see colour without opening my eyes. I saw that Billy's heart was no colour and every colour. Like water or diamonds or crystals, it's pure and reflects the light.

I saw pearls in her mouth and the velvet cushion of her tongue and I heard the magic words come out of her.

I didn't understand right away what she meant. But her words soaked through my skull like warm oil, behind my eyes, down my spine and into the empty space inside me.

You don't tell anyone things like that about your friends, even when you're mad at them.

Maybe if the empty space inside her was filled with love there'd be no room for sad and dark things.

... I'll tell her about Tia. I'll tell her how beautiful she was and how brave. And I'll tell her the most important thing of all: that her mother loved her better than her life.

Sometimes it's better to live without a mother than not to live at all.

I didn't know what to say when someone's given you a small free kiss in the dark ...

Through the night we drove in a tangle of waking and sleeping, nightmares from hell and holy white dreams.

I have lived eighty years of life and know nothing for it, but to be resigned and tell myself that flies are born to be eaten by spiders and man to be devoured by sorrow.

I can't believe it. I'm speechless. It is amazing to see where I've come from the last two years.

One gets so used to one's own horrors, one forgets how they must seem to other people.

Mass ought to be in Latin, unless you could do it in Greek or Chinese. In fact, any abracadabra that no bloody member of the public or half-educated ape of a clargimint could think he understood.

I have an intimate relationship with books. After all, I take them with me into the bathtub-not an invitation I offer lightly.

One thing about mildly dyslexic people - they're good at setting everything else aside to pursue one goal.

Emblem: the carapace of the great crowned snail is painted with all the flags of the United Nations.

By the time a man is 35 he knows that the images of the right man, the tough man, the true man which he received in high school do not work in life.

Some people just don't want to put in the effort. I just show up and say some lines and I'm famous. Anyone living below the poverty line just needs to shape up or be shipped out, you know?