"Sometimes [she] thought of her life as a room with no doors and no windows. It was a sumptuous room, sure... but it was also a room from which there really wasn't an escape. Either [she] was someone she didn't want to be, or she was someone who nobody wanted."

"There was a part of her that wondered what would happen if she let them all in on the secret- that some mornings, it was hard to get out of bed and put on someone else's fake smile; that she was standing on air, a fake who laughed at all the right jokes and whispered all the right gossip and attracted the right guy, a fake who had nearly forgotten what it felt like to be real... and who, when you got right down to it, didn't want to remember, because it hurt even more than this."

"Nobody wants to admit this, but bad things will keep on happening. Maybe that's because it's all a chain, and a long time ago someone did the first bad thing, and that led someone else to do another bad thing, and so on. You know, like that game where you whisper a sentence into someone's ear, and that person whispers it to someone else, and it all comes out wrong in the end. But then again, maybe bad things happen because it's the only way we can keep remembering what good is supposed to look like."

"If you spend your life concentrating on what everyone else thought of you, would you forget who you really were? What if the face you showed the world turned out to be a mask . . . with nothing beneath it?"

"Whether or not you believe in Fate comes down to one thing: who you blame when something goes wrong. Do you think it's your fault-that if you'd tried better, or worked harder, it wouldn't have happened? Or do you just chalk it up to circumstance? I know people who'll hear about people who dies, and will say it was God's will. I know people who'll say it was bad luck. And then there's my personal favourite: They were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Then again, you could say the same thing about me, couldn't you?"

"If you gave someone your heart and they died, did they take it with them? Did you spend the rest of forever with a hole inside you that couldn't be filled?"

"We live in a country where American kids are dying because we're sending them overseas to kill people for oil. But when one sad, distraught child who doesn't see the beauty in life goes and wrongly acts on his rage by shooting up a school, people start pointing a finger at heavy metal music. The problem isn't rock lyrics, it's with the fabric of this society itself."

"People has figured out all sorts of ways to make things seem different than they truly were. A room could be turned into an artificial night. Botox transformed people's faces into something they weren't. TiVo let you think you could freeze time, or at least reorder it to your own liking. An arraignment to a courthouse fit like a Band-Aid over a wound that really needed a tourniquet."

"Dead was dead. When you died, you did not get to come back and see what you were missing. You didn't get to apologize. You didn't get a second chance. Death wasn't something you could control. In fact, it would always have the upper hand."

"Was she mourning? Did mourning feel like a hole in the middle of you that got wider and wider every time you tried to plug it up? Or was she incapable of mourning, because that meant remembering what she couldn't do?"

"I sometimes think it's easier to be the one who's been hurt than the one who couldn't stop it from happening."

"H=R/E, or happiness equals reality divided by expectation"

"There were Hallmark cards for bereavement, for loss of a beloved pet, for getting laid off from a job, but no one seemed to have the right words of comfort for someone whose son had just killed ten people."

"It was a chicken and egg conundrum: were they animals because they were in jail . . . or were they in jail because they were animals?"

"When you don't fit in, you become superhuman. You can feel everyone else's eyes on you, stuck like Velcro. You can hear a whisper about you from a mile away. You can disappear, even when it looks like you're still standing right there. You can scream, and nobody hears a sound. You become the mutant who fell into the vat of acid, the Joker who can't remove his mask, the bionic man who's missing all his limbs and none of his heart. You are the thing that used to be normal, but that was so long ago, and you can't even remember what it was like."

"That was the way this society worked: you were only at the bottom of the totem pole until you could find someone else to take your place."

"You could lose track of someone when you blinked..."

"You can feel people staring; it's like the heat that rises from the pavement during the summer, like a poker in the small of your back. You don't have to hear a whisper to see what they were staring at. I wanted to know what made their heads turn, what it was about me that was so incredibly different. At first I couldn't tell. I mean, it was just me. Then one day, when I looked in the mirror, I understood. I looked into my own eyes and I hated myself, maybe as much as all of them did. That was the day I started to believe they may be right."

"How could you be so alive one moment, and then have everything stop-not just your heart and your lungs, but the way you smiled slowly, the left side of your mouth curling before the right; and the pitch of your voice; and the habit you had of tugging at your hair when you were doing your math homework?"

"As it turns out, kids are more like us than we think: damaged, through and through."