I could never hate you, even if I wanted to.

We’re good at taking care of little kids, and spend a lot of energy teaching them things like how to read. But when kids get as tall as their parents and can look them in...

I am angry that I starved my brain and that I sat shivering in my bed at night instead of dancing or reading poetry or eating ice cream or kissing a boy…

Why are you being so mean?””Friends tell friends the truth.””yeah, but not to hurt, to help.

The world is crazy. You need a license to drive a car and go fishing. You don’t need a license to start a family. Two people have sex and BAM! Perfectly innocent kid is born...

I wish America would stop judging and criticizing teens and instead, try to understand the battles they have to fight every day.

You have to know what you stand for, not just what you stand against.

She turns to us, acts surprised to see us, then does the bit with the back of the hand to the forehead. “You’re lost!” “You’re angry!” “You’re in the wrong school!” “You’re in the wrong...

Yeah, but not to hurt. To help.

This is my one beef with Hollywood: It’s great for movie sales, but they’ve created this fiction for us that, when you have a hard thing in your life, it’s going to get fixed, and...

It’s easier to floss with barbed wire than admit you like someone in middle school.

This is wonderful, wonderful! Be the bird. You are the bird. Sacrifice yourself to abandoned family values….

Love messes you up and makes you do strange things

I think maybe I might have to do what some other authors do, which is do a variation on my name, just to send readers the message that, ‘Yep, this is me, but this is...

I’m learning how to taste everything.

When people don’t express themselves, they die one piece at a time.

If I had lady-spider legs, I would weave a sky where the stars lined up. Matresses would be tied down tight to their trucks, bodies would never crash through windshields. The moon would rise above...

I’m finally watching ‘Mad Men.’ As a child of the ’60s, I can’t believe how old everything looks! I am the age of baby Eugene.

In one aspect, yes, I believe in ghosts, but we create them. We haunt ourselves.

Nicole can do anything that involves a ball and whistle.

The gloaming that closed over us the cemetery had crawled inside his skin.

We’ve fallen down on our responsibility to our children by somehow creating this world where they’re surrounded by images of sexuality; and yet, we as adults struggle to talk to kids honestly about sex, the...

My English teacher has no face. She has uncombed stringy hair that droops on her shoulders. The hair is black from her part to her ears and then neon orange to the frizzy ends. I...

Me: “All right, but you said we had to put emotion into our art. I don’t know what that means. I don’t know what I’m supposed to feel.

There is no magic cure, no making it all go away forever. There are only small steps upward; an easier day, an unexpected laugh, a mirror that doesn’t matter anymore.

IT happened. There is no avoiding it, no forgetting. No running away, or flying, or burying, or hiding.

I hate winter. I’ve lived in Syracuse my whole life and I hate winter. It starts too early and ends too late. No one likes it.