"If you put enough closets together, you have enough space for a room. If you put enough rooms together, you have enough room for a house. If you put enough houses together, you have space for a town, then a city, then a nation, then a world."

"I want you to spend the night, you said. And it was definitely your phrasing that ensured it. If you had said, "Let's have sex, or "Let's go to my place, or even "I really want you, I'm not sure we would have gone quite as far as we did. But I loved the notion that the night was mine to spend, and I immediately decided to spend it with you."

"I can see that the sadness has returned. And it's not a beautiful sadness- beautiful sadness is a myth. Sadness turns our features to clay, not porcelain."

"I realized I would always be missing something. That no matter what I did, I would always be missing something else. And the only way to live, the only way to be happy, was to make sure the things I didn't miss meant more to me than the things I missed. I had to think about what I wanted, outside the heat of wanting."

"...It's just nice to see you out from his shadow. Because things don't grow in the shadows, you know? So it was frustrating to see you standing there...and really cool to see you step out of it. I don't know who this new guy is, but make sure when you're with him, you're not standing in his shadow. Stand where everyone can see you."

"I'm told there's no going back. So I'm choosing forward."

"I am jealous of anyone who can make other people care so much."

"There will always be more questions. Every answer leads to more questions. The only way to survive is to let some of them go."

"A Cue from NatureRun outside during a thunderstormThat downpour, that conquered hesitation, that exhilarationThat's what unlonely is like."

"My lines all curve. I tend to connect the wrong dots."

"I wish she could see how it hits him. The look on his face, his life caving in. Because then maybe she'd realize, if only for a split second, that even though the world doesn't matter to her, she matters to the world."

"New Yorkers love the bigness -- the skyscrapers, the freedom, the lights. But they also love it when they can carve out some smallness for themselves. When the guy at the corner store knows which newspaper you want. When the barista has your order ready before you open your mouth. When you start to recognize the people in your orbit, and you know that, say, if you're waiting for the subway at eight fifteen on the dot, odds are the redhead with the red umbrella is going to be there too."

"Some days are like this. And the only way to get through them is to remember that they are only one day, and that every day ends."

"My eyes are open and I'm not seeing a thing because I am so lost inside."

"Either way, you were connected. By your desires. By your defiance. By the simple, complicated fact of who you were."

"It was so screwed up, because the thing that made us the most powerless also gave us such power. We could make them turn away. We could bother them and challenge them and mess them up. You think people are afraid of two boys in love? To hell with that. What people are really afraid of is two boys screwing."

"Now, if there's anything stupider than buddy lists, its lol. if anyone ever uses lol with me, i rip my computer right out of the wall and smash it over the nearest head. i mean, it's not like anyone is laughing out loud about the things they lol. i think it should be spelled loll. like what a lobotomized person's tongue does. loll. loll. i can't think anymore. loll. loll! or ttyl. bitch, you're not actually talking. that would require actual vocal contact or <3. you honestly think that looks like a heart? if you do, that's only because you'v never seen scrotum. (rofl! what? are you really rolling on the floor laughing? well, please stay down there a sec while i KICK YOUR ASS)"

"The sadness will ebbthe trouble is the time it might take."

"It's a highly deceptive world, one that constantly asks you to comment but doesn't really care what you have to say."

"Does it ever get easier?is there an end to these questions?do you have any answers?will you say them to me?can you stop this unraveling?will you bring me your closure?or am I the only onewho sees anymore?who sees . . .who sees . . .who sees?"

"We always underestimated our own participation in magic. That is, we thought of magic as something that existed with or without us. But that's not true. Things are not magical because they've been conjured for us by some outside force. They are magical because we create them, and then deem them so. Ryan and Avery will say the first moment they spoke, the first moment they danced, was magical. But they were the ones-no one else, nothing else-who gave it the magic. We know. We were there. Ryan opened himself to it. Avery opened himself to it. And the act of opening was all they needed. That is the magic."

"When I turned to look at you, I was afraid to move again-the moment was just too beautiful to be lost."

"It's one thing to fall in love. It's another to feel someone else fall in love with you, and to feel a responsibility toward that love."

"Teenagers are never joking. when seeking to prove a point, principals and teachers should remember that teenagers are never, ever sarcasic or ironic. if they say "I wish someone would drop a bomb on this school right now," that means they have arranged for a nuclear arsenal to be emptied onto the school and should be immediately suspended and ridiculed. if they say they were merely coming up with a joking excuse to postpone a bio test, reply that all jokes are funny, and that since dropping a bomb on a school is not funny, it is therefore not a joke."

"People say that time slips through our fingers like sand. What they don't acknowledge is that some of the sand sticks to the skin. These are the memories that will remain, memories of the time when there was still time left."

"The heart knows nothing except its own mind."

"I tried to shut myself down completely, put up my best screensaver personality to coast through the day. I didn't want to see her. I was desperate to see her. I wanted to hold it together. I wanted to melt down right at her feet and scream, Look what you've done to me."

"Really, weren't these facts just placeholders until the long view could really assert itself?"

"It doesn't work, she continues, unclasping her hands, smoothing her skirt. "What you're feeling right now doesn't work. You can't wander around and think the wandering will call them back. Believe me. I know you don't want to hear the long view, but let me tell you. You are so young. I know it's none of my business. But still."

"It is an awful thing to be betrayed by your body. And it's lonely, because you feel you can't talk about it. You feel it's something between you and the body. You feel it's a battle you will never win . . . and yet you fight it day after day, and it wears you down. Even if you try to ignore it, the energy it takes to ignore it will exhaust you."

"You don't realize - the great thing about change is how quickly we get used to it. So I'm not complaining. the more things change,the more they don't stay the same. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. They might not change everywhere all at once - but there are moments when the impossible becomes the inevitable, and the rest is just a matter of time."

"I wake up feverish, sore, uncomfortable.Is it sickness or is it heartbreak?I can't tell.The thermometer says I'm normal, but I'm clearly not."

"My face seems too square and my eyes too big, like I'm perpetually surprised, but there's nothing wrong with me that I can fix."

"When you need to hold onto something, you should. Whatever gets you through, take it."

"They are so caught up in their happiness that they don't realize I'm not really a part of it. I am wandering along the periphery. I am like the people in the Winslow Homer paintings, sharing the same room with them but not really there. I am like the fish in the aquarium, thinking in a different language, adapting to a life that's not my natural habitat. I am the people in the other cars, each with his or her own story, but passing too quickly to be noticed or understood. . . . There are moments I just sit in my frame, float in my tank, ride in my car and say nothing, think nothing that connects me to anything at all."

"We do not start as dust. We do not end as dust. We make more than dust.That's all we ask of you. Make more than dust."

"Your Temporary Santa, "He says presents aren't important, but I think they are- not because of how much they cost, but for the opportunity they provide to say 'I understand you."

"We could call you an ambisexual. A duosexual. A-"Do I really have to find a word for it? Kyle interrupts. "Can't it just be what it is?"Of course, I say, even though in the bigger world I'm not so sure. The world loves stupid labels. I wish we got to choose our own.We pause for a moment. I wonder if that's all-if he just needed to say the truth and have it heard. But then Kyle looks at me with unsure eyes and says, "You see, I don't know who I'm supposed to be."Nobody does, I assure him."

"Her mind is an unquiet one, words and thoughts and impulses constantly crashing into each other."

"I wake up.Immediately I have to figure out who I am. It's not just the body-opening my eyes and discovering whether the skin on my arm is light or dark, whether my hair is long or short, whether I'm fat or thin, boy or girl, scarred or smooth. The body is the easiest thing to adjust to, if you're used to waking up in a new one each morning. It's the life, the context of the body, that can be hard to grasp.Every day I am someone else. I am myself-I know I am myself-but I am also someone else.It has always been like this."

"Stupid arbitrary shit means it will take a movie star to die and a hemophiliac teenager to die before ordinary people start to mobilize, start to feel that the disease needs to be stopped. Tens of thousands of people will die before drugs are made and drugs are approved. What a horrible feeling that is, to know that if the disease had primarily affected PTA presidents, or priests, or white teenage girls, the epidemic would have been ended years earlier, and tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of lives would have been saved."

"I had made it somewhere special, and I'd gotten there all on my own. Nobody had given it to me. Nobody had told me to do it. I'd climbed and climbed and climbed, and this was my reward. To watch over the world, and to be alone with myself. That, I found, was what I needed."

"I will be the one to leave you."

"No more looking at a wall and pretending it's a mirror. No more shelving fiction in the non-fiction section. No more thinking I could get away with it."

"I just mean that if we go through this thing and it changes us so much, you have to hope that it changes us for the better, right? If goodness can't come from bad things, it makes bad things unbearable."

"I showed him the Post-it. "You see They're from Lily."Who's Lily?"Some girl."Ooh... a girl!"Boomer, we're not in third grade anymore. You don't say, 'Ooh... a girl!'"What? You fucking her?"Okay, Boomer, you're right. I liked 'Ooh... a girl!' much more than that. Let's stick with 'Ooh... a girl!"

"Once time is lit, it will burn whether or not you're breathing it in. Even after smoke becomes air, there is the memory of smoke. I am seeing as if by the light of a match, a glimpse of my life and having it feel right."

"If this continues, if this goes on, then when I die, your memories of me will be my greatest accomplishment. You memories will be my most lasting impressions."

"I think they would like the songs betterif I left out the names, or changedthe pronouns."

"The devil doesn't make anyone do anything. People just do things and blame the devil after."