It’s not my fault I can’t be like you, okay? I don’t get up in the morning thinking the world is one big, shiny, happy place, okay? That’s just not how I work. I don’t...

And when I wake up it’s wonderful, like I’ve been carried quietly onto a calm, peaceful shore, and the dream, and its meaning, has broken over me like a wave and is ebbing away now,...

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...

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.

Someday all the wilds will be razed, and we will be left with a concrete landscape, a land of pretty houses and trim gardens and planned parks and forests, and a world that works as...

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.

She knew that this day, this feeling, couldn’t last forever. Everything passed; that was partly why it was so beautiful. Things would get difficult again. But that was okay too.The bravery was in moving forward,...

I reached and ran a finger along her collarbones, my favorite place: like the silhouette of tiny wings.

Do the other kids make fun of you? For how you talk?”Sometimes.”So why don’t you do something about it? You could learn to talk differently, you know.’But this is my voice. How would you be...

I’ve learned to get really good at this – say one thing when I’m thinking about something else, act like I’m listening when I’m not, pretend to be calm and happy when I’m really freaking...

Unhappiness is bondage; therefore, happiness is freedom.

All of it was hers, hers and Nat’s, and all those years were nestled inside them like one of those Russian dolls, holding dozens of tiny selves inside 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...

I feel a flash of grief so intense it almost makes me cry out: not for what I lost, but for the chances I missed.

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

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

How did I love her?Let me count the ways.The freckles on her nose like the shadow of a shadow; the way she chewed her lip when she was thinking and the way her ponytail swung...

…I’ve never really had a party before.””Why did you have one now?” I say, just to keep him talking.He gives a half laugh. “I thought if I had a party, you would come.

Who knows? Maybe they’re right. Maybe we are driven crazy by our feelings. Maybe love is a disease, and we would be better off without it. But we have chosen a different road. And in...

Let me tell you something about dying: it’s not as bad as they says.it’s the coming-back-to-life part that hurts.

With the cure, relationships are all the same, and rules and expectations are defined. Without the cure, relationships must be reinvented every day, languages constantly decoded and deciphered. Freedom is exhausting.

For the first time in my life I actually feel sorry for Carol. I’m only seventeen years old, and I already know something she doesn’t know: I know that life isn’t life if you just...

Sometimes I feel as though there are two me’s, one coasting directly on top of the other: the superficial me, who nods when she’s supposed to nod and says what she’s supposed to say, and...

You blew everything away.

Promise me we’ll stay together, okay?” His eyes are once again the clear blue of a perfectly transparent pool. They are eyes to swim in, to float in, forever. “You and me.””I promise,” I say.Behind...

it occurs to me that there is so much I never knew about him–his past, his role in the resistance, what his life was like in the Wilds, before he came to Portland, and I...

There’s still always the possibility that I’ve gone totally, clinically cuckoo. But somehow I don’t think so anymore.An article I once read said that crazy people don’t worry about being crazy – that’s the whole...

because I don’t have much time.

I want to be in a room room. A lived-in room.

As Steve draws me closer to the band, all I can see is a frenzied mass of seething, writhing people, like a many-headed sea snake, grinding, waving their arms, stamping their feet, jumping. No rules,...

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

Here’s the last thing that occurs to me as Sarah recedes in the rearview mirror, slamming out of the car, jogging across the parking lot: If you’re one tardy away from missing out on a...

The sparrows jumped before they knew how to fly, and they learned to fly only because they had jumped

The idea—the fact of it, the fact that he even noticed and thought about me for more than one second—is huge and overwhelming, makes my legs go tingly and my hands feel numb.

But it’s not about knowing. It is simply about going forward.

An itchy feeling began to work its way through my body, as though a thousand mosquitoes were circulating through my blood, biting me from the inside, making me want to scream, jump, squirm. I ran.

They couldn’t have known that even this was a lie—that we never really choose, not entirely. We are always being pushed and squeezed down one road or another. We have no choice but to step...

Every day, streets papered with more and more for .Reward, reward, reward.Reward for information.If you see something, say something.A paper town, a paper world: paper rustling in the airm whispering to me, hissing out a...

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

That was what her parents did not understand—and had never understood—about stories. Liza told herself storied as though she was weaving and knotting an endless rope. Then, no matter how dark or terrible the pit...

I’m with Julian,” I say at last. This, after all, is what I have chosen.

The rules of Panic are simple. Anyone can enter. But only one person will win.

There was one painting, I remember, that showed a broad, clean sweep of sky and the ocean drawn out to the horizon, and the sand littered with seashells and crabs and mermaid’s purses and bits...

,Quien sabe? Quizas ellos tengan razón. Quizas estamos siendo manejados como locos por nuestros sentimientos. Quizas el amor es una enfermedad y estaríamos mejor sin ella. Pero nosotros elegimos una ruta diferente. Y al final,...

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

Two weeks until your cure” she says finally. “Sixteen days” I say, but in my head I’m counting: Seven days. Seven days until I’m free and away from all these people and their sliding superficial...

When you’re completely free, you’re also completely on your own.

We are such small, stupid things. For most of my life I thought of nature as the stupid thing: Blind, animal, destructive. We, the humans, were clean and smart and in control: we had wrestled...

Everyone is asleep. They’ve all been asleep for years. You seemed … awake.’ Alex is whispering now. He closes his eyes, opens them again.’I’m tired of sleeping.

Let me show you