Whuppins were like kid taxes we paid with our behinds.

She could ask for anything, she thought dizzily, anything–an end to pain or world hunger or disease, or for peace on earth. But then again, perhaps these things weren’t in the power of angels to...

In winter this town is freezing. You step out your door in the morning and the whole place looks like one of those nature specials in which a guy brings a camcorder to the North...

Books didn’t make me wallow in darkness, darkness made me wallow in books.

You two are bound to one another. You always have been … and you can’t run away from what you are. No matter where you go, your feelings for her are going to follow you.

Change is a contact sport.

Sometimes I wonder about good and evil. If the villain wins, isn’t he heralded as the hero? I’ve tried so hard to be good since that day, but sometimes I wonder whether it’s even worth...

Consider, if you will, the morning boner. What a metaphor of hope and renewal! How can anyone give way to despair when one’s groin greets each day with such a gala spectacle of physical optimism?

For the love of God, unless you’re prepping for Rigoletto at the Met, go easy on the eyeliner.

The warmth and the passion in my veins are more than enough for a hundred thirsty girls.

Each time that I have felt like I might finally be figuring some things out, life has decided to change the rules and I’ve had to start all over again.

Although many things may still need to happen before you identify what your exact work will be, I know that every single person whom you’re meeting and every experience that you’re having is necessary to...

The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise.

I became a nightangle in the darkness ❤ ❤

He wishes he could remember everything. Anything. He doesn’t sense a bone in his body that can feel compassion or worthiness. Self-pity hides away as well, the lowest form of emotion not even capable of...

Education is the master key to greatness; without it, a child would be faced with the darkness of a future that’s full of uncertainties.

After that, I’d wanted to date, but I simply didn’t know how. It seemed to come natural to everyone else, pairing up and going out. And now, well, I felt like a nonparticipant, like there...

It was the flashing lights, and the noise of the machines, and the loud, loud music, all seeming to refract and contract around her, her eyes widening, her hair swooshing, her slow smile shining. She...

Then turn your eyes back on me,and tell me that Cathy and I are still children to be treated with condescension, and are incapable of understanding adult subjects.

Everything that happens to you matters to me.

We are going to change the way young people think about fitness.

I wanted to know what it was like to be a drug addict, and have an eating disorder, and have a loved one die, and fall in love. I saw my friends going through these...

Matteo lived inside her like a memory that paradoxically stopped the pain and which she could never get enough of… because there was, and never would be, anything that was like him. Wherever she went,...

These problems are real, and you can’t turn off real life. So I won’t try. Instead, I’ll give you a set of tools to help you deal with real life.

I was just stock in the middle, vague and undefined.

How embarrassing that she ever did something that silly. But, good God, she was seventeen. At that age, we’re mostly high-pitched and crazy. All urgent chemicals raging around the blood course. And that’s why we...

One warm morning in July, a ghost came to our breakfast table.

I failed angst in high school. They let me graduate anyway.

Hope, in anything but myself, is just way too dangerous right now…

As girls, we will do anything for the person whom we love. We will scale buildings in the rain or run through fire if it means saving our love’s life. There is absolutely nothing more...

As a child, I read because books–violent and not, blasphemous and not, terrifying and not–were the most loving and trustworthy things in my life. I read widely, and loved plenty of the classics so, yes,...

Some people were simply created with the right genes and the proper social skills, I figured. They ended up at a lunch table with a group of good-looking individuals, like them, who did what all...

The butterflies swirl again in Sera’s stomach. Perhaps they have brought along fireflies too, to light up her soul.

This is one rule about mixing boys and girls: that a date always comes first.

One minute the teacher was talking about the Civil War. And the next minute he was gone. There. Gone. No ‘poof.’ No flash of light. No explosion.

We sat there smiling at each other, shimmied to a standstill, thinking about all the boys that had wanted us that day, and how none of them had got us, not for a minute; how...

just on the verge ofbecoming a woman, and in these three years and almost five months, I’dreached maturity. I was older than the mountains outside. The wisdomof the attic was in my bones, etched on...

Embrace your beautiful mess of a life with your child. No matter how hard it gets, do not disengage… Do something—anything—to connect with and guide your child today. Parenting is an adventure of the greatest...

And although I broke a lot of laws as a teenager, I straightened out immediately upon turning eighteen, when I realized the state had a legal right to execute me.

Dear Teens at Starbucks wearing ‘Abstain from Sex 2 Attain Ur Goals’ t-shirts: Doesn’t it depend on what my goals are?

If she had looked into his eyes at that very moment she would have seen the inferno that she had thrown him into.

Why is it that when you don’t want to think about something, you can’t stop thinking about it?

Respect should be found in your own heart and never demanded, sacraficed, begged for or negotiated. If you have to explain why you deserve it then you never had it.

Have you ever really wanted to be able to do something, but you came across a roadblock of some kind?You have a difficult choice. I made that choice once and it changed my whole life,...

When a zashiki warashi came to live with you, good fortune smiled upon the whole house.

I guess I had always sort of fantasized that a guy would see me and get past the ponytail and the glasses and the giant sweatshirt to discover how insanely awesome I am, then come...

I never want you to deny anything about yourself because you have grown up thinking it’s unacceptable or inconvenient for the people around you.

I lost my innocence very young and it had nothing to do with sex.

Teenagers read millions of books every year. They read for entertainment and for education. They read because of school assignments and pop culture fads. And there are millions of teens who read because they are...

Sleep is the only thing I stay awake for.