Things change after you die, though – I guess because dying is about the loneliest thing you can do.

Grief is like sinking, like being buried. I am in water the tawny color of kicked-up dirt. Every breath is full of choking. There is nothing to hold on to, no sides, no way to claw myself up. There is nothing to do but let go.Let go. Feel the weight all around you, feel the...

Maybe Lindsay and I are best friends and we hate each other, both. Maybe I’m only one math class away from being a slut like Anna Cartullo. Maybe I am like her, deep down. Maybe we all are: just one lunch period away from eating alone in the bathroom. I wonder if it’s ever really...

Her fierce and fearful friend –who loved country music and cherry Pop Tarts and singing in public and the color pink, who was terrified of germs and dogs and ladders.

It seems like as we stand there I’m watching my whole life with Hana, our entire friendship, fall away: sleepover parties with forbidden midnight bowls of popcorn; all the times we rehearsed for Evaluation Day, when Hana would steal a pair of her father’s old glasses, and bang on her desk with a ruler whenever...

He Is looking at me through the smoke, across the fence. He never takes his eyes off me. His hair Is a crown of leaves, of thorns, of flames. His eyes are blazing with light, more light than all the lights in every city in the whole world, more light than we could ever invent...

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.

Love will turn the whole world into something greater than itself.

Each step is more difficult than the last; the heaviness fills me and turns my limbs to stone.You must hurt or be hurt.

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

He believed in people. He believed that if people could only be shown the right way-the way to health and order, a way to be free of unhappiness-they would make the right choice. They would obey.

I hate skin; I hate bones and bodies. I want to curl up inside of him and be carried there forever.

Please understand. Please forgive me.I prayed every day for you to be alive, until hope became painful.Don’t hate me.I still love you.

Aquí hay algo más que recordar: la esperanza te mantiene viva. Incluso cuando estás muerta, es lo único que te mantiene viva.

But you can build a future out of anything. A scrap, a flicker. The desire to go forward, slowly, one foot at a time. You can build an airy city out of ruins.

What glitters may not be gold; and even wolves may smile; and fools will be led by promises to their deaths.

Things change after you die, though, I guess because dying is the loneliest thing you can do.

That’s when I realized that certain moments go on forever. Even after they’re over they still go on, even after you’re dead and buried, those moments are lasting still, backward and forward, on into infinity. They are everything and everywhere all at once.

Music, I think, he makes me feel like music.

Everything in me feels fluttering and free, like I could take off from the ground at any second. Music, I think, he makes me feel like music.

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,...

A free world is also a world of fracture

I guess they’ll find out that freedom doesn’t keep you warm,

Freedom is exhausting.

I was going to tell you that you look beautiful with your hair down. That’s all I was going to say.

It’s so strange how life works: You want something and you wait and wait and feel like it’s taking forever to come. Then it happens and it’s over and all you want to do is curl back up in that moment before things changed.

People are stubborn and stupid. They’re irrational. they’re destructive. that’s the point, isn’t it? That’s the whole reason for the cure. People will no longer destroy their own lives. They won’t be capable of it.

Somehow, the pain only makes it better, more intense, more worth it.

The air is still and freezing cold. The sky is a perfect, pale blue. The sun has just risen, weak and watery-looking, like it has just spilled itself over the horizon and it’s too lazy to clean itself up.

Look, I’m not going to have sex with him just so he’ll say that he loves me, you know?”…That isn’t why I was planning to have sex with Rob – to hear the words, I mean. I just wanted to get it over with. I think. Actually, I’m not sure why it seemed so important.

I don’t understand how everything changes, how the layers of your life get buried. Impossible. At some point, at some time, we must all explode.

Don’t you get it? You can’t tell me what to feel.

It’s the rule of the wilds. You must be bigger, and stronger, and tougher. A coldness radiates through me, a solid wall that is growing, piece by piece, in my chest. He doesn’t love me.He never loved me.It was all a lie.”The old Lena is dead.” I say, and then push past him. Each step...

Lies are just stories, and stories are all that matter. We all tell stories. Some are more truthful than others, maybe, but in the end the only thing that counts is what you can make people believe.

Because I think you’re right. You can make a difference.” He told me experiences were kind of like fate, and fate usually came in the form of a test. He told me fate liked to be worshiped. It liked to see us fall on out knees before it offered to help us up…” ♥

But for now, the future, like the past, means nothing.

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?

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

She liked the word ineffable because it meant a feeling so big or vast that it could not be expressed in words.And yet, because it could not be expressed in words, people had invented a word to express it, and that made Liesl feel hopeful, somehow.

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

I’d rather die on my own terms than live on theirs. I’d rather die loving Alex than live without him.

He is my world and my world is him and without him there is no world.

And for a moment―for a split second―everything else falls away, the whole pattern and order of my life, and a huge joy crests in my chest. I am no one, and I owe nothing to anybody, and my life is my own.

He pauses for only a fraction of a second. Then he leans forward and presses his lips to mine, and the whole world powers off, the moon and the rain and the sky and the streets, and it’s just the two of us in the dark, alive, alive, alive.

You blew everything away.

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 dreams that I heard the word shouted, screamed.

Sometimes day and night reverse. Sometimes up goes down and down goes up, and love turns into hate, and the things you counted on get washed out from under your feet, leaving you pedaling in the air. Sometimes people stop loving you. And that’s the kind of darkness that never gets fixed, no matter how...

…into hate, into refusal, against hope and without fear

Don’t worry about what you’re writing or whether it’s good or even whether it makes sense.

Why do you flirt with Mr. Daimler? He’s a perv, you know.”I’m so surprised by the question it takes me a second to answer. “Mr. Daimler is not a perv.””Trust me, he is.””Jealous?””Hardly.””I don’t flirt with him, anyway.”Kent rolls his eyes. “Sure.”I shrug my shoulders. “Why so interested?”Kent goes red and drops his eyes to...