"The problem is not that I don't love my mother and father. The problem is that I don't know how to love them."

"Everyone was always becoming someone else.Sometimes, when you were older, you became someone younger. And me, I felt old. How can aguy who's about to turn seventeen feel old?"

"Do you know what dead skin looks like when they take off a cast?That was my life, all that dead skin. It was strange to feel like the Ari I used to be. Except that wasn't totally true. The Ari I used to be didn't exist anymore. And the Ari I was becoming? He didn't exist yet."

"I always thought of men as being hard-maybe because I was hard. But there was a softness in Tom that betrayed his large masculine hands and his deep baritone voice. He knew something about love that I didn't. I don't know where he'd learned it, but it wasn't something you got from a book, not something you could learn in an online class, not something you could borrow. Maybe it was something you were born with. Some people knew how to love and some people didn't. Tom was the former. I was the latter. I didn't know which one of us had it worse."

"Summer was here again. Summer, summer, summer. I loved and hated summers. Summers had a logic all their own and they always brought something out in me. Summer was supposed to be about freedom and youth and no school and possibilities and adventure and exploration. Summer was a book of hope. That's why I loved and hated summers. Because they made me want to believe."

"I wondered how that felt, to really like yourself. And I wondered why some people didn't like themselves and others did. Maybe that's just the way it was."

"Summertime. It was a song. It was a season. I wondered if that season would ever live inside of me."

"I have this idea that the reason we have dreams is that we're thinking about things that we don't know we're thinking about-and those things, well, they sneak out of us in our dreams. Maybe we're like tires with too much air in them. The air has to leak out. That's what dreams are."

"In the distance, I can see a storm coming in, the dark clouds and the lightning on the horizon moving towards me. I wait and I wait and I wait for the storm. And then it comes, and the rains wash away the nightmares and the memories. And I'm not afraid."

"I was fifteen.I was bored.I was miserable."

"I decided that maybe we left each other alone too much. Leaving each other alone was killing us."

"Do you think it will always be this way?'What?'I mean, when do we start feeling like the world belongs to us?I wanted to tell him that the world would never belong to us. 'I don't know, I said. 'Tomorrow."

"Wow, a world without darkness. How beautiful was that?"

"It started to rain and we just sat. Sat and watched the rain in silence."

"Another secret of the universe: Sometimes pain was like a storm that came out of nowhere. The clearest summer could end in a downpour. Could end in lightning and thunder."

"The day he came home from the hospital, he cried. I held him. I thought he would never stop.I knew that a part of him would never be the same.They cracked more than his ribs."

"I mean, okay, let's say we're all going to get better. Let's just pretend we will. Fine. Where are we going to go after we get better? What are we going to do with all of our newfound healthy behaviors? Back out into the world that screwed us up and screwed us over. This does not sound promising."

"Maybe it wasn't a good idea to rank the people in your life. That's not how the heart worked. The heart didn't make lists."

"I wanted to tell her happy was hard for me. But I think she already knew that."

"I also knew I had inherited the name of the world's most famous philosopher. I hated that. Everyone expected something from me. Something I just couldn't give.So I renamed myself Ari.If I switched the letter, my name was Air.I thought it might be a great thing to be the air.I could be something and nothing at the same time. I could be necessary and also invisible. Everyone would need me and no one would be able to see me."

"Someday, I'm going to have to break some of your rules, Mom.'I know,' she said. 'Try to do it behind my back, will you? You can bet on that, Mom. We both sat there and laughed."

"I wished it was raining,' he said.'I don't need the rain,' I said. 'I need you."

"I wish I didn't have a heart that God wrote Sad on."

"I have this idea stuck in my head that you have to be born beautiful in order to dream beautiful things. God didn't write beautiful on my heart. I'm stuck with all my bad dreams. Bad dreams for bad boys. I guess that's the way it is for me. Look, there's nothing I can do about it."

"Words exist only in theory. And then one ordinary day you run into a word that exists only in theory. And you meet it face to face. And then that word becomes someone you know. That word becomes someone you hate. And you take that word with you wherever you go. And you can't pretend it isn't there."

"Feeling sorry for myself was an art."

"I have it in my head that when we're born, God writes things down on our hearts. See, on some people's hearts he writes happy and on some people's hearts he writes sad and on some people's hearts he writes crazy and on some people's hearts he writes genius and on some people's hearts he writes angry and on some people's hearts he writes winner and on some people's hearts he writes loser."

"I don't know what the exact shape of my life will take--and what the days to come will bring--except i know that i am happy and my heart is still. I know that I have fallen in love with the word surrender and know that I can no longer live in disappointment."

"The heart can get really cold if all you've known is winter."

"I wondered what it was like to feel whole, to not feel torn up or stunned out or wigged out or any of those things. I wondered what it was like to walk around the world looking up at the sky instead of searching the ground, eye to eye with things that crawled."

"I was getting an A for work. But not for talent. The story of my life."

"Adam says I isolate. He is addicted to telling me that I spend too much time in my head. It's an unhealthy behavior. Look, I don't see how not bothering other people with your screwed-up vision of the world constitutes unhealthy behavior."

"Did you hear me, Zach? I care about you. 'Okay, I said. 'It's okay with me that you care about me. But can we please not talk about it? Would that be okay with you? 'Yeah, that would be okay, he said."

"Summer was a book of hope. That's why I loved and hated summers. Because they made me want to believe."

"We think there's a reason for everything, as if life was supposed to make sense. It's not exactly math. People aren't numbers. Everybody knows life doesn't make any sense at all, so we just better deal with the whole mess. Have a beer. Have a cup of coffee. Have a piece of cake. Go out to a movie. Enjoy the Popcorn."

"And prayer? How could you pray to a God you wanted to hit?"

"I wondered what it would be like, to love a girl, to know how a girl thinks, to see the world through a girl's eyes. Maybe they knew more than boys. Maybe they understood things that boys could never understand."

"I didn't think it was my job to accept what everyone said I was and who I should be."

"I guess I did miss Dante-even though I tried hard to not think about him. The problem with trying hard not to think about something was that you thought about it even more."

"What did being connected to the world get you? It got you sadder. Look, the world is not sane. If you stay connected to an insane world, well, you just go crazy. This is not a complicated theory. It's just simple logic."

"I was ashamed of myself for being ashamed of myself. I didn't like feeling like that."

"I bet you could sometimes find all the mysteries of the universe in someone's hand."

"Grief was a terrible and beautiful thing."

"That was the first time I did coke.My body, it was electric. For the first time in my life I felt as if I had a real heart and a real body and I knew that there was this fire in me that could have lit up the entire universe. No book had ever made me feel that way. No human being had ever made me feel like that."

"I live in an ecotone. Employment must coexist with goofing off. Responsibility must coexist with irresponsibility."

"You can't expect to go both ways when you're driving on a one-way street."

"No wonder I stopped keeping a journal. It was like keeping a record of my own stupidity. Why would I want to do that? Why would I want to remind myself what an asshole I was?"