"Anger is useful only to a certain point. After that, it becomes rage, and rage will make you careless."

"Love can open like a flower out of even the hardest places."

"Nothing has ever been so painful or delicious as being so close to him and being unable to do anything about it: like eating ice cream so fast on a hot day you get a splitting headache."

"It's amazing how close I have been, all this time, to my old life. And yet the distance that divides me from it is vast."

"Here's one of the things I learned that morning: if you cross a line and nothing happens, the line loses meaning. It's like that old riddle about a tree falling in a forest, and whether it makes a sound if there's no one around to hear it. You keep drawing a line farther and farther away, crossing it every time. That's how people end up stepping off the edge of the earth."

"I think of the quietness of Julian's voice as he said I love you, the steadiness of his rib cage rising and falling against my back, as we sleep.I love you, Julian. But the words don't come."

"Popularity's a weird thing. You can't really define it, and it's not cool to talk about, but you know it when you see it. Like a lazy eye, or porn."

"You broke my heart.I fell for you and you broke my heart.Period, done, end of story."

"They told us love was a disease. They told us it would kill us in the end.For the very first time I realize, that this, too, might also be a lie."

"Is it possible to tell the truth in a society of lies? Or must you always, of necessity, become a liar?And if you lie to a liar, is the sun somehow negated or reversed?"

"Is what I did really so much worse than what anybody else does?Is it really so much worse than what you do?Think about it."

"I told you," he whispers back. I can feel his breath just tickling the space behind my ear, making my hair prick up on my neck. "I like you.""You don't know me," I say quickly."I want to, though."

"When she was little, she'd liked to pretend that stars were really lights anchoring distant islands, as if she wasn't looking up but only out across a dark sea. She knew the truth now but still found stars comforting, especially in their sameness. A sky full of burning replicas."

"You do not know what will happen if you take down the walls; you cannot see through to the other side, don't know whether it will bring freedom or ruin, resolution or chaos. It might be paradise or destruction. Take down the walls. Otherwise you must live closely, in fear, building barricades against the unknown, saying prayers against the darkness, speaking verse of terror and tightness. Otherwise you may never know hell, but you will not find heaven, either."

"People need other people to feel things for them," she said. "It gets lonely to feel things all by yourself."

"Amazingly, I can still see the stars: whole galaxies blooming from nothing - pink and purple suns, vast silver oceans, a thousand white moons."

"We wanted the freedom to love. We wanted the freedom to choose. Now we have to fight for it."

"Unhappiness is bondage; therefore, happiness is freedom."

"It's for the best. But no matter how many times I repeat it, the strange, hollow feeling in my stomach doesn't go away. And ridiculous as it is, I can't shake the persistent, needling feeling that I've forgotten something, or missed something, or lost something forever."

"So many things become beautiful when you really look."

"At least when I'm sleeping I can dream myself back to Alex, can dream myself into a different world."

"I can't stop thinking about what Caroline said to Minna about death. It isn't an infection, she said. She might be right. Then again, we've nested in the walls like bacteria. We've taken over the house, its insulation and its plumbing - we've made it our own. Or maybe it's life that's the infection: a feverish dream, a hallucination of feelings. Death is purification, a cleaning, a cure."

"An eye for an eye." "And the whole world goes blind," Coral puts in quietly."

"The details that are life's special pattern, like how in handwoven rugs what really makes them unique are the tiny flaws in the stitching, little gaps and jumps and stutters that can never be reproduced. so many things become beautiful when you really look."

"I used to think that's what love was: knowing someone so well he was like a part of you."

"It was unfair that people could pretend to be one thing when they were really something else. That they would get you on their side and then do nothing but fail, and fail, and fail again. People should come with warnings, like cigarette packs: involvement would kill you over time."

"A good friend keeps your secrets for you. A best friend helps you keep your own secrets."

"This music ebbs and flows, irregular, sad. It reminds me, weirdly, of watching the ocean during a bad storm, the lashing, crashing waves and the spray of sea foam against the docks; the way it takes your breath away, the power and the hugeness of it.That's exactly what happens as I listen to the music, as I come up over the final crest of hill, and the half-ruined barn and collapsing farmhouse fan out in front of me, just as the music swells, a wave about to break: The breath leaves my body all at once, and I'm struck dumb by the beauty of it. For a second it seems to me like I really am looking down at the ocean-a sea of people, writhing and dancing in the light spilling down from the barn like shadows twisting up around a flame."

"I wonder if this is how people always get close: They heal each other's wounds, they repair the broken skin."

"I keep having the urge to cross my hands over my chest, to cover up my breasts, to hide. I'm suddenly aware of how pale I look in the sunshine, and how many moles I have spotting up and down my chest, and I just know he's looking at me thinking i'm wrong or deformed. But the he breathes, 'Beautiful' and when his eyes meet mine I know that he really, truly means it."

"Sympathizer.It's only slightly better than the other word that followed me for years after my mom's death, a snakelike hiss, undulating, leaving its trail of poison: Suicide.A sideways word, a word that people whisper and mutter and cough: a word that must be squeezed out behind cupped palms or murmured behind closed doors. It was only in my dreams that I heard the word shouted, screamed."

"Running is a mental sport, more than anything else. You're only as good as your training, and your training is only as good as your thinking."

"We are all punished for the lives we have chosen, in one way or another."

"But for now, the future, like the past, means nothing. For now, there is only a homestead built of trash and scraps, at the edge of a broken city, just beyond a towering city dump; and our arrival-hungry, and half-frozen, to a place of food and water and walls that keep out the brutal winds. This, for us, is heaven."

"If you're ever wishing for things to go back to the way they were. You just have to look up."

"I shiver, thinking how easy it is to be totally wrong about people-to see one tiny part of them and confuse it for the whole, to see the cause and think it's the effect or vice versa."

"Chance. Stupid, dumb, blind chance. Just a part of the strange mechanism of the world, with its fits and coughs and starts and random collisions."

"God bless Dunkin' Donuts."

"Take down the walls."

"I feel as though I'm in a dream, where strange things are happening but they don't feel strange. Everything is cloudy-everything is wrapped in a fog-and I'm filled from head to toe with the single, burning desire to get closer to the music, to hear the music better, for the music to go on and on and on."

"I met an Invalid, and fell for his art. He showed me his smile, and went straight for my heart."

"As soon as she sees me she swings forward and hits a key on her keyboard. The music cuts off instantly. Strangely, the silence that follows seems just as loud."

"Most of the time - 99 percent of the time - you just don't know how and why the threads are looped together, and that's okay. Do a good thing and something bad happens. Do a bad thing and something good happens. Do nothing and everything explodes. And very, very rarely - by some miracle of chance and coincidence, butterflies beating their wings just so and all the threads hanging together for a minute - you get the chance to do the right thing."

"There is only what you want and what happens. There is only grabbing on and holding tight in the darkness."

"This was progress. This was modernity: you could cover over the past completely. You could bury the old under a relentless surface of new, stretched from corner to corner."

"On the day that started it all, that rocketed me forward and landed me here, in this new body, in this new future."

"Everything has taken on a strange, distant quality - the sounds of running and shouting outside get warped and weird like they're being filtered through water, and Alex looks miles away. I start to think I might be dreaming, or about to pass."

"I learned to swallow words back, hold secrets on my tongue until they dissolved like soap bubbles."

"While other girls were blurry, displaying cracks or, at the very least, seams - ripped jeans, coffee-stained T-shirts, hair that poufed up in the rain - Sophia always looked sharp, clear, as if the resolution had been turned up on a microscope and angled straight at her, as if the money had formed a kind of shrink wrap that kept her protected from the normal destruction of the everyday."

"This is one of my favorite things about the Underground: the crashing of the cymbals, the screeching guitar riffs, music that moves into the blood and makes you feel hot and wild and alive."