"Who but the mad would choose to keep on living? In the end, aren't we all just a little crazy?"

"I've never been in love. I will die without knowing what it feels like to need to see one person's face when you go to sleep at night, to crave seeing it when you wake up. I wish I knew."

"You must remember, my dear lady, the most important rule of any successful illusion: First, the people must want to believe in it."

"The land has a memory. Every stream and river runs with a confession of sorts, history whispered over rocks, lifted in the beaks of birds at a stream, carried out to the sea. Buffalo thunder across plains whose soil was watered with the blood of battles long since relegated to musty books on forgotten shelves. Fields once strewn with blue and gray now flower with uneasy buds. The slave master snaps the lash, and generations later, the ancestral scars remain.Under it all, the dead lie, remembering."

"And now if you'll excuse me, I should like to finish my book, alone, without the presence of a single ringleted girl to disrupt me. If you should come for me at dinner and find me in my chair, gone to the angels at last, you shall know that I died alone, which is to say in a state of utter bliss."

"There had been something about the island that made the girls forget who they had been. All those rules and shalt nots. They were no longer waiting for some arbitrary grade. They were no longer performing. Waiting. Hoping. They were becoming. They were."

"I know it. I know I shall make beastly mistakes, Father-""The world does not forgive mistakes so quickly, my girl." He sounds bitter and sad."If the world will not forgive me," I say softly, "I shall have to learn to forgive myself."He nods in understanding."And how will you marry? Or do you intend to marry?"I think of Kartik, and tears threaten. "I shall meet someone one day, as Mother found you."

"Please, I'm a transgender former boy-bander. You think I don't know how to defend myself?"

"I've been poked and prodded in places I'd always prided myself on keeping untouched for that one special doctor who gives me a ring and a promise someday."

"Every city is a ghost.New buildings rise upon the bones of the old so that each shiny steel bean, each tower of brick carries within it the memories of what has gone before, an architectural haunting. Sometimes you can catch a glimpse of these former incarnations in the awkward angle of a street or filigreed gate, an old oak door peeking out from a new facade, the plaque commemorating the spot that was once a battleground, which became a saloon and is now a park."

"Petra turned to her. "Everybody lies about who they are. Name one person here who isn't doing that and I will drop out right now!"Shanti felt that snake of truth coil around her legs, threatening to squeeze. "I didn't mean...""No one ever does." Petra said, shoving the baton back at Shanti."

"When she can't bring me to heal with scolding, she bends me to shape with guilt."

"What kind of person doesn't let you have gummi bears?"

"What is the French word for rain? Le rain? La rain? Is the rain masculine or feminine? It's such a bother that it must be masculine."

"The library card is a passport to wonders and miracles, glimpses into other lives, religions, experiences, the hopes and dreams and strivings of ALL human beings, and it is this passport that opens our eyes and hearts to the world beyond our front doors, that is one of our best hopes against tyranny, xenophobia, hopelessness, despair, anarchy, and ignorance."

"Ain't that a sight? With all the things we know and learn, we still ain't touched the big mysteries -- where we come from, where we go next, why we even her. And when something truly miraculous happens, we run and hide in our caves. We deny."

"Did God ever cry over his lost angel, I wonder?"

"Sometimes we seek that which we are not yet ready to find."

"I stare at the pile of discarded remnants and think of my mother. Did she touch that pillar there? Does her scent still linger in a fragment of glass or a splinter of wood? A terrible emptiness settles into my chest. No matter how much I go about living, there are always small reminders that make the loss fresh again."

"I've been thinking about that book about the boys who crash on the island....Lord of the Flies what about it....You know how you said it wasn't a true measure of humanity since there were no girls and you wondered how it would be different if there had been girls...Maybe girls need an island to find themselves. Maybe they need a place where no one's watching them so they can be who they really are."

"I run after her, not really giving chase. I'm running because I can, because I must.Because I want to see how far I can go before I have to stop."

"A man bumps me on his busy way without so much as an apology. But that is all right. I forgive you, busy man about town with the sharp elbows. Hail and farewell to you! For I, Gemma Doyle, am to have a splendid Christmas in London town. All shall be well.God rest us merry gentlemen. And gentlewomen."

"Reminds us that greatness lies even in the smallest of moments, in the humblest of hearts, and we shall, each of us, be called to greatness. Whether we shall rise to meet it or let it slip away is the challenge put before us all."

"I don't think you should die until you're ready. Until you've wrung out every last bit of living you can."

"I'm a wild girl from a cursed line of women. I paw at the ground and run under the moon. I like the feel of my own body. I'm not a slut or a nympho or someone who's just asking for it. And if I talk too loud it's just that I'm trying to be heard."

"It was so hard to feel safe in the world when you were a girl."

"Careful there, Poet. I might start to believe you."

"There is an ancient tribal proverb I once heard in India. It says that before we can see properly we must first shed our tears to clear the way."

"I'm an oddity of one, my strangeness too complicated to explain or share."

"I've never done acid, finding it hard to go willingly to a place that could be frightening, hellish, and totally beyond my control. A place much like high school."

"You and I, we must carry on, Gemma. I cannot afford the luxury of love. I must marry well. And now I must look after you. It is my duty.""If you wish to suffer, you do so of your own free will, not on my behalf. Or Father's or Grandmama's or anyone's. You are a fine physician, Thomas. Why is that not enough?""Because it isn't," he says with a rare candor. "Only this and the hope of nothing more? A quiet respectability with no true greatness or heroism in it, with only my reputation to recommend me. So you see, Gemma, you are not the only one who cannot rule her own life."

"I am hard at work on the second draft ... Second draft is really a misnomer as there are a gazillion revisions, large and small, that go into the writing of a book."

"They have money and position and Ann has none.It's amazing how often you can be right as long as you have those two things working in your favor."

"It had the word bitches in it, which is perfectly fine to use if you're a rapper or a director making a movie about career women, but not if you're a teen girl talking about her homies.""Good point, Petra. We know that young ladies of the teen persuasion do not use these indelicate words. Nor do they have thoughts about sex, masturbation, violence, being competitive, or farting."

"To each his own magic."

"The wind swoops over the tenements on Orchard Street, where some of those starry-eyed dreams have died and yet other dreams are being born into squalor and poverty, an uphill climb. It gives a slap to the laundry stretched on lines between tenements, over dirty, broken streets where, even at this hour, hungry children scour the bins for food. The wind has existed forever. It has seen much in this country of dreams and soap ads, old horrors and bloodshed. It has played mute witness to its burning witches, and has walked along a Trail of Tears; it has seen the slave ships release their human cargo, blinking and afraid, into the ports, their only possession a grief they can never lose."

"Writers are also sort of like vultures, but with fewer ethics."

"Agent Jones switched to the big screen and a grainy video of MoMo sitting at his enormous desk, a swivel-hipped Elvis clock ticking behind his bewigged head. 'Death to the capitalist pigs! Death to your cinnamon bun-smelling malls! Death to your power walking and automatic car windows and I'm With Stupid T-shirts! The Republic of ChaCha will never bend to your side-of-fries -drive -through-please-oh-would-you-like-ketchup-with-that corruption! MoMo B. ChaCha defies you and all you stand for, and one day, you will crumble into the sea and we will pick up the pieces and make them into sand art."

"Write like it matters, and it will."

"We have work to do if you are not to be a total failure like high-waisted, acid-wash jeans."

"To those who will see, the world waits."

"I understand we'll be attending your friend Miss Worthington's Christmas ball. Perhaps I'll find a suitable-- which is to say wealthy-- wife among the ladies attending."And perhaps they will run screaming for the convent."

"I can see his pain, see it in the way he runs his fingers through his hair, over and over, and I understand what it costs him to hide it all."

"Travel opens your mind as few other things do. It is its own form of hypnotism, and I am forever under its spell."

"As a kid, I imagined lots of different scenarios for my life. I would be an astronaut. Maybe a cartoonist. A famous explorer or rock star. Never once did I see myself standing under the window of a house belonging to some druggie named Carbine, waiting for his yard gnome to steal his stash so I could get a cab back to a cheap motel where my friend, a neurotic, death-obsessed dwarf, was waiting for me so we could get on the road to an undefined place and a mysterious Dr. X, who would cure me of mad cow disease and stop a band of dark energy from destroying the universe."

"Our mouths and bodies speak for us in a new language as the trees shake loose a rain of petals that stick to our slickness like skins we will wear forever. And just like that, I am changed."

"New Maxi-Pad Pets. Accessories for your period.Brought to you by The Corporation: In your homes andin your pants."

"I'm Sorry,' he says. It's simple and direct, with none of the nonsense about God calling home an angel too young and who are we to question his mysterious ways."

"There is no greater power on this earth than story."

"I should never be left alone with my mind for too long."